Reading Tweets on a mobile device can be a cumbersome experience. I have noticed that most of the mobile Twitter clients score poorly on either the feature set or the user experience.  I am happy to report that HipTweet comfortably scores in both these areas. It packs in a complete Twitter feature set and also delivers a sleek experience enabled by a combination of large font styles and appealing colors.

To start using this application you need to login using your Twitter credentials. The home screen is neatly organized into three major sections. The Twitter action icons section at the top of screen, your Twitter time line section at the center of the screen and ‘Options’/'Refresh’ icons section at the bottom of the screen. The UI design is simple and yet very striking.

If you click on a Tweet, you get options to ‘Reply to the Tweeter’,'Add Tweet to Favorites’, ‘Re-tweet’ and ‘Send a direct message(DM) to the Tweeter’. In this view, you can browse through your time line by swiping your finger across the screen from right to left.

If you are in a mood to share your thoughts, you can click the ‘What’s happening’ icon. You can enter your thoughts in the text area and you can also tag friends by using the ‘@’ icon in the image below. This screen also provides you an option to upload photos.

By clicking on the ‘Options’ icon, you can access your Twitter details such as ‘Mentions’, ‘Favorites’, ‘Retweets’ and ‘Lists’.

Through the settings menu you can enable location scanning, modify timeline refresh period and select data connection options.

Another interesting feature in HipTweet is the location based search. Using this feature, you can search for Tweets or people near your current location. The application uses the built-in GPS receiver in your smartphone to pull out your location. In the screen shot below, I searched for all Tweets mentioning ‘Nokia’ in ‘White Plains,NY’.

As I said earlier, the user experience in HipTweet is great. The speed and responsiveness of vertical scrolling can be improved.  Owing to the large fonts, the number of tweets you can browse is limited. The user could be given an option to browse through older tweets by organizing the tweets in multiple navigable pages. Overall, I am extremely impressed with HipTweet. It provides an easy to use interface for both content creation and consumption.

HipTweet is free to download from Ovi store.

HipTweet was developed by Silicon valley based HipLogic. Apart from HipTweet, they have also developed another social networking app called Spark. Do check out the Ovi Daily App review of *Spark beta here.