Why Twitter users on Android should check out Echofon

There’s no lack of mobile Twitter clients, and just as we choose our smartphones, picking a Twitter app is very personal decision. Having said that, I keep coming back to Echofon. I originally chose it because of one key aspect: It syncs Twitter activity across iOS and the Mac OS X desktop client. The OS X client is now at the end of its life as the developer is focused solely on mobile apps now. And now there’s an Echofon client for Android that offers the same great sync feature: With Echofon, you’ll never re-read tweets if you have both iOS and Android devices.

Echofon for Android has been in public beta since the beginning of November and that app is still available in a free, ad-supported version. If you like the beta, you can opt to pay $ 4.99 for the Pro version which is now available in Google Play. Here’s a look at the client on an Android device:

Support for all the Twitter basics are in there: in-app image view, a Jump to Top option, the sync feature and Jelly Bean notifications; helpful if your Android device is running  Android 4.1 or better. You can reply or retweet, for example, directly from the Android notifications pane. That’s a nice time-saver. Even better is a full-featured widget that puts Echofon on an Android home screen: It shows the number of unread tweets, mentions, DMs and lets you compose new tweets with a button tap. And a quick left or right swipe moves you between different views.

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I keep coming back to the sync function as a key advantage, however. It gets old when you switch to a different mobile device and have to reread various mentions, interactions or direct messages. With Echofon, I don’t have to worry about that as I hate reading the same content over and over.


GigaOM