Video walk through the Zune HD Twitter app
About midday yesterday we saw the Twitter application appear on the Zune HD and I quickly installed it on my Zune. I also mentioned that the ads were removed from the four non-game applications on the Zune HD. I spent some more time over the past day using the Twitter application and recorded the below video so you could see it in action.
The Zune HD Twitter application actually looks quite nice on the Zune HD and gives you most all of the support and functionality you want on a small WiFi-connected device. The limitations I found at this time is the inability to Retweet something and the lack of support for lists. To be fair though there are very few apps that support lists and this is a fairly new feature for Twitter so I really don't count that against them with this current release client.
Since this is a Zune HD media player, I did like seeing that a single tap of the note icon puts the song title and artist of what you are listening to right into your Tweet so you can quickly and easily share what you are listening to at that time.
I don't quite understand why there is even a settings option since all it does is give you some basic stats and the ability to logout. I was looking for an automatic refresh interval and number of Tweets to download on a single page by default. Then again, this is a Zune HD so I can't imagine too many people living in this Twitter app and needing automatic refresh capability.
The predictive text keyboard is actually pretty good and I am getting better the more I use it. It is important to remember that you need to tap the X to the right of the predictive line if you enter something not accurately predicted rather than the space bar or the predicted text will be entered and appear in your Tweet.
I read on Engadget that Microsoft censors your Tweets so that swear words will appear with ** in them. This isn't an issue for me since I never swear on Twitter, but I really don't think it is Microsoft's job to be the filter for Twitter and am sure this will get people up in arms. Unlike what the folks at Engadget were seeing, my Twitter experience was pretty fluid and stable, as you can see in my video above.
Let me know if you have any questions about the application. With the more capable browser provided in the recent November update, I am using my Zune more for couch surfing and this Twitter app helps with that practice.