Something Android phones have been sorely lacking is the availability of any truly great Twitter applications.

Many say that Twidroid is just that, but other people I’ve spoken to (who I agree with) find the application both too slow and the interface design terrible. If it were on the iPhone, it would easily win the competition for the worst-designed interfaces on the App Store.

But, despite its God-awful logo, Seesmic has potential in both these areas – especially since its first update today – and successfully adds some features that others have failed to implement well so far. Three highlights come to mind when thinking of the new Seesmic for Android app:

It’s ridiculously easy to use!

Everything is where you would expect it to be; navigation sits in tabs at the top of the screen, the menu button gives you publishing options and direct messages are threaded so look like IM chats. It’s also very easy on the eye so you don’t have to deal with the eyesore that is Twidroid for a fully-featured Android client (which, like Tweetdeck, makes Twitter a very unpleasant experience for me).

Images for your consumption:

Stay notified

Yeah, I know; nearly every Android Twitter app has notifications. Though native notifications support comes as standard, it’s often not executed well. Luckily Seesmic features a great notifications system which allows you to customise what updates the app looks for, how often it checks for them and how it should present it to you – status bar, flashing LED, vibrations, ringtones.

The level of customisation is great and allows you to filter out simple timeline updates – something which HTC’s Peep doesn’t let you do – and only get notified on @replies and direct messages – or vice versa. This is very similar to how Twidroid handles notifications, but the speed of the app makes accessing updates after notifications much quicker.

It’s speedi(er)

The big negative around Twidroid and HTC’s proprietary Peep applications are both speed. Even though you may set update intervals to every five minutes, whether it actually does so or not is another matter. The applications are both unacceptably unresponsive for accessing a network that can chuck out multiple updates per minute.

Seesmic is not as fast as the lightweight apps like TwitWalk (a.k.a. Twitgee) and iTweet, but it does out-speed its full-featured siblings and is fully recommended if you are a high-power Twitter.

It’s not all rosy though.

Even though Seesmic is probably the best full-featured Twitter client on Android, it doesn’t come without its shortcomings.

Firstly, the applications doesn’t share its APIs with the operating system, so you can’t directly share a photo from your image album via Seesmic. Instead, you need to access Seesmic and upload it within the app. Hardly a deal-breaker, but can be annoying if you take a photo or find a link you want to Tweet quickly.

Secondly, although Seesmic is faster than the other full-featured applications, it’s still pretty slow. It’s terribly slow compared to the likes of Tweetie 2 for iPhone. It’s still frustrating when trying to share something or reply to someone quickly, for this reason I recommend having a second, light-weight Twitter app to do all the quick stuff.

Finally, unlike Seesmic for Windows there is not yet support for Twitter lists. There is no official word from Seesmic whether this will be coming to the Android version, but this addition would be most welcomed for ease of viewing of multiple groups of updates.

So in short – it’s got potential, and with a few updates it could very easily solidify its position as the top Android Twitter app.

UPDATE - It appears that some HTC Hero users are suffering very slow load times for this app. Will update once we work out where the problem lies - Turns out this may be down to HTC Sense UI’s power-hungry widget system. Close as many widgets as possible to speed the whole system up!

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