Twikini Updated and Reviewed

I’ve talked about Twitter clients a fair amount around here, including a review of the beta version of Twikini back in May. Since that post, Twikini has seen a couple of releases and there’s another release coming up really soon that adds support for posting a link to your exact location using Google Maps. In my review I listed a couple things that were missing from Twikini that I felt was needed to make it a hands-down winner in the Windows Mobile space. I’m please to say that the most recent version has addressed just about everything on that list. Twikini supports multiple user accounts, skweezer for browsing links, sending Direct Messages, as well as showing TwitPic’s without actually having to open the twitpic website. Needless to say, Twikini has been my Windows Mobile twitter client of choice for a while now. If you haven’t checked it out, I recommend you do. It’s well worth the $5 price tag.

If you haven’t read my past review, it’s right here. For something a little more recent, I also recommend you take a look at the review posted by Clinton Fitch. Clinton does a great job of going over the features and showing you all the screen shots you can manage. It will give you a full understanding of what you can expect from Twikini before you even download it.

Microsoft’s MyPhone is Great But…

Microsoft’s MyPhone service allows you to backup your Windows Mobile device to the cloud in case of loss or accidental deletion. It’s a very simple application that will backup your data once a day at a given time. It only uploads the items that have been added or changed. When you get a new phone, you can just install the MyPhone client and it will sync all your contacts, photos, music, and appointments. If you don’t have data, you can still use MyPhone. Just configure the client to do a manual sync and make sure you ActiveSync your phone first and then you can run the backup. It’s worth having a backup.Since I have an unlimited data plan, I leave my phone to backup every night at 11:30pm.

I came across a bug with MyPhone while I was on vacation and out of cellular coverage. As I mentioned, the MyPhone client is set to backup my phone every night. However, since I was out of cellular coverage I disabled the radio on the phone. Why waste the battery having it try to find a cell tower when I know it won’t. However, MyPhone would still run and try to run the backup despite not having a cellular connection to work on. It would then display an error message about failing to backup. Now, I can understand that there is a need to let the user know that the backup failed. However, if the cellular radio isn’t even on, then I don’t see the point. The radio would have been turned off for a reason – MyPhone needs to check the status of the radio and respect that. I use the phone as a clock, and in the morning I grab it to see the time. Because of this, I had to clear the error before returning to the home screen and seeing the time.

MyPhone still ranks tops in my books, but Microsoft needs to address this little bug. Oh, and while you’re at it, they should also think about allowing you to name each phone that connects. As it is now, I have 5 “Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard” and 1 “Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional”. I can figure out which device the Professional one is. But I’m not sure which of the Standard ones I should be deleting. It would also be nice if I could connect multiple phones to the same MyPhone account and decide if I want to keep their information separate from each other or merged together so that they all have the exact same content. I’ve got a lot of other nice-to-have’s for MyPhone, but for now, let’s just start with fixing the problem with trying to sync even when the radio is off.