App Review - Smartr for iPhone turns Twitter links into headlines

Ricardo Trejo Feb 1, 2011 Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Us App Review, Apple, Applications, Downloads, Exclusive, Reviews, Twitter, iPad, iPhone, iPod

What if there was a way to separate all the important stuff, like the linked stories and pictures people tweet, from all the random and dispensible spam that your Twitter feed is undoubtedly full of? Not only that, but what if you could make a sexy UI for it, one that actually made sense and was as practical as it is versatile? Well, Smartr for iPhone would like to have a word with you.

Smartr
App type: Twitter Reader
Price: Free
Compatible: iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad — iOS 4.0 or later required
Developer: Factyle Inc.

Twitter has progressively become a real-time news ticker. Sure, we get the occasional tweet from our buddies telling us where they’ve checked in with 4square or how someone’s cat looks absolutely adorable right now, but those end up being more spam than anything else. What if you could get all the important stuff, like all the links that appear in your Twitter feed, and get them to display in a list view separate from all the dispensible stuff? Smartr does just that.

Links Become Headlines

Each day, at some point I reach for my iPhone and I check the latest on Twitter. I see what everyone’s talking about, what they’re upto, and what they want me to read and then put it away for later. I hardly ever visit links within tweets when I’m on my mobile because it’s just so inconvenient to crack open up a link and have the full site display on such a small screen. I have no problem following links when I’m on a desktop or laptop, but that’s the whole point — in a mobile environment it’s not the smartest thing in the world to force a user to trek from here and there to read a simple story or to watch a funny video.

What Smartr does is filter through your feed’s tweets and displays only the ones with links. Once you tap on a story you remain in Smartr, and if possible, the entire story displays within Smartr with images and everything. You never have to leave the app, and there are no sites to load up.

Catching up on the day’s headlines has never been simpler, and navigating through the app is smooth and doesn’t ever slow down — that is until you reach the end of the current timeline, which then Smartr will take about 3 to 5 to 10 seconds to load up the next set of tweets for you to check out. It’s a little inconvenient but it’s nothing that will make someone write this app off.

Options

There are various options as well, such as toggling the list view to be a compact set of narrow looking tweets, or you can pinch out to expand and have the overall look be that of a newspaper. Within your feed, to the right of each tweet, you’ll notice two buttons; retweet and pin. Retweeting is self-explanatory, but pinning saves stories for later. I really enjoyed pinning since I could skim through my feed and find the stories that I actually wanted to read, pinned all of those, and then read them later on when I had the time to do so.

Smartr wasn’t built to replace your Twitter app of choice, and so because of that you’ll notice a lot of tools, such as being able to tweet images, search trends, or even check @replies and DM’s, are missing from the experience. That being said, I would like to see a version of Smartr in the future that allows me to go back and forth between me being able to view my tweets as I would anywhere else, and having just the ones Smartr wants me to see. At the moment you can write tweets, but if it doesn’t include in link in it somewhere then you won’t see it pop up within the feed.

Interestingly enough, loading up Smartr after not using for a while impedes its ability to have your Twitter feed ready to go immediately. I’m assuming that it takes a while for it all to sort through your tweets and find the nuggets with the nice looking images to display. If you have no problem waiting about 20 seconds for it all to show up then you’ll have no issue.

Overall

While it’s not meant to become your new Twitter app, it is the best way out there to finally check out all those links that appear day in and day out on your feed. It does have a lot of regular tools, such as @replies and DM’s missing, but again Smartr was designed to be a newspaper like layout to all the links you never read. Perhaps now that they’re all displayed to you in a practical and less intimidating fashion you can no catch up on your reading.

Download now on iTunes
Available for iPhone

Update: As per their latest version, Smartr has now given users the ability to read all of their tweets instead of just those with links attached to them. This gives Smartr the versatility to act not only as the perfect News Reader but also your Twitter app of choice.