PockeTwit works on both touch and non-touch screen devices. When looking at a tweet, pressing left will bring up a menu showing you all the global options you can select. And pressing right will bring up a menu with all the options you have in relation to the tweet you have selected. Over time, these menus have grown to include more and more options. Beyond the normal twitter client features, with PockeTwit, you can easily:

• update your location based on the GPS in your device,
• email the selected message to someone that’s not on Twitter,
• search or view the public timeline,
• build a custom theme or select one of the pre-loaded themes,
• use Skweezer when following links in IE Mobile,
• set custom notifications,
• click and follow @names and #hashtags,
• create groups for different topics of conversation,
• merge tweets from multiple accounts into one timeline for easy management,
• and so much more.

PockeTwi t is easily the most feature packed mobile Twitter client I have used. How can someone go wrong with such a feature rich product? Well, there are some shortcomings. The first is the speed – PockeTwit has always suffered with speed issues. While things did improve since the early versions, the latest version has been a significant step backwards. It takes far too long to launch PockeTwit, especially the first time. On top of that scrolling through your timeline can be very painful.

The next major drawback with PockeTwit is focus – PockeTwit has always been great at keeping your position in the timeline during updates. You’ll never need to worry about losing your place. However, after large updates, the indicator shows that you are at the top of the list, but in reality you are at the bottom of the list. You need to scroll up 2-3 times before the application figures this out and correctly draws your location and the corresponding tweets. This problem also shows up when you reply or quote someone and you are not near the top of the timeline. After you submit the tweet, the screen will show tweets that are above your current position while it updates the timeline and then jump back to the correct location. This isn’t a killer problem, but it sure does get annoying.

The last issue that I’m going to focus on is the address book – PockeTwit will keep track of the people that tweet in your timeline so that you can quickly create new tweets that reference those people. It works like this; as you’re typing your tweet and enter the @ symbol, PockeTwit will pop up a window with people’s accounts making it very easy to select someone and continue. The problem here is that the popup doesn’t always draw correctly which makes it extremely hard to find the person you’re looking for. Furthermore, sometimes the person isn’t in your list yet, in which case PockeTwit has a hard time letting you enter the name. Again, it’s not a killer problem, but it sure can be annoying.

Select problems aside, PockeTwit has the best feature set and offers functionality that others can only dream of right now and is well worth the download. The single biggest issue with this client is speed. The developers need to focus their energy on getting PockeTwit to run and navigate faster.

Another really awesome addition, is the ability to email a Tweet. When you select “Email Status” you can pick which email account you want to send this message from and then you’re presented with a standard compose screen for email. I’ve just installed the latest version of Pocketwit and I’ve already used this feature a couple times.

As you use Pocketwit, it tracks the people you receive tweets from and then displays them in an auto-complete fashion when you’re typing a message. This is simply great when you’re on a mobile device and you’re trying to recall the exact spelling of someone’s account name. Not everyone’s address is as easy as MobileJaw.

Of course, there’s always a little pain with changes. The first problem I’m having is that sending a tweet with a picture doesn’t seem to work. The tweet goes through, but not the image. I’ll have to play with this a little more and see what’s going on. But the bigger issue, at least in my opinion, is the menu layout. With the addition of Email Status, some things had to change in order to display everything on the menu. Unfortunately, the decision was to add a submenu for reply. That means, for me to reply to a tweet, I have to scroll to the right, then select “Respond To” and a new menu pops up. From here I select either “Reply To” or “Direct”. That’s a lot of clicking for a simple reply. I think it would be better to leave Direct and Reply as first level menu options and instead compile some of the lesser used items under a “Other”, “Continued” or even “More” menu item. I could easily have the Follow, Timeline, and Profile options moved to a submenu as they are used a lot less than Reply and Direct.

Even though I would like to see the menu layout changed, it’s really a small beef when you consider all the things you get by using Pocketwit. It’s still my Twitter client of choice for Windows Mobile devices. If you haven’t installed it yet, then give it a try. I think you’ll like what you find. You can download the latest version here.