Review: Dabr, a relatively unknown mobile twitter client, yet my favorite by far

Twitter. The heavily debated service is one that some people say is a waste of time, while others say it’s an indispensable communications medium. I was a huge anti-Twitter spokesman back during my days of using Jaiku. Jaiku had threads, and while your first Jaiku post was limited to 140 characters, the replies that went under that particular thread had no limit. Jaiku had the ability to add your favorite services in a similar fashion to how FriendFeed works. Jaiku had a fantastic mobile optimized website and even had a mobile client that integrated into your mobile phones’ address book. Back when Twitter was experiencing growing pains, Jaiku was always up, and us Jaiku users made fun of Twitter users and their broken service. Fast forward a year and some change and Twitter became relatively rock solid, Jaiku was having tremendous problems, and soon we would find out that the people behind Jaiku have decided to go work for Google and that Jaiku would now be treated as a side project.

On January 14 2009 I joined Twitter for the second time and forced myself to use the service for a week. What I soon discovered was that while Jaiku was a place to have deep meaningful conversations, Twitter was just something to have open in the background that you’d check out periodically just to see what’s new. Instead of wanting Twitter to be more like Jaiku, which I did in the beginning, I just accepted Twitter for what it was and learned to deal with the limits. Over the next few weeks and months, I got hooked. Forcing everyone to express themselves in 140 characters helps remove a lot of the bullshit people put around the statements they really want to say, but need to do so in a politically correct manner. Using the retweet function to quickly spread news is brilliant. Using a hashtag to see tweets from a particular event or about a certain topic is fantastic. The killer feature of Twitter however is the search engine.

Searching, in real time, everyone’s public tweets is powerful. When I was living in Helsinki (and I plan to move back there within a week or two) I used a Twitter client called TweetDeck to show me every tweet, in real time, that contained the word Helsinki to find some new friends and to learn about upcoming events. When I was working for Nokia, I used TweetDeck to show me every tweet with the word “Nokia”, and I can’t stress this enough, in real time, thereby letting me answer people’s questions about their new device or help recommend a mobile phone. All of this was really new and exciting for me, and old news to many veteran Twitter users, but I was still missing a mobile version of Twitter that let me access all of Twitter’s functions in a neat and efficient way.

Enter Dabr, a service unknown to many, but to me it is the perfect Twitter client. Check out my review after the jump.

Dabr is an open source web service created by David Carrington (@davidcarrington) that interfaces with the Twitter API and presents you with a tight user interface, optimized for mobile phone use.

To access Dabr, open your mobile phone browser and type in dabr.co.uk:

Here you’re presented with a request for your login details, or you can use OAuth:

This is what you see after you’ve successfully logged in, note that Dabr supports showing previews of photos posted from Twitpic:

Let us see what sort of settings we can manipulate:

You can change the color of Dabr to “Ugly Orange”, “Touch Blue”, “Sickly Green” or “Kris’ Purple”, here is what the home screen looks like with all those options:

For the sake of this review, I’ll stick with “Sickly Green” since it’s my favorite. Now the next round of options surrounds the environment in which you’ll be using Dabr: “Normal Phone”, “Touch Phone”, “PC/Laptop”, “Text Only” or “Work Safe”, here is what the home screen looks like with those options:

For the remainder of this review I’m stick to “Normal Phone” mode, again using the “Sickly Green” theme. The last setting is one of my favorites, and it deals with external links. Now the web browser inside the Nokia E71 I’m using is plenty good, but in reality a lot of the links my friends share are to full desktop optimized websites that I don’t have the patience to sit through and wait to load. Google has something called the “Google Web Transcoder” that strips out a lot of a websites content and leaves you with just the important bits. Here is what my blog post about Nokia’s netbook looks like after it has been transcoded:

As you can see, a lot of IntoMobile’s formatting has been stripped out and what is left is the article’s text and images that have been resized to fit the width of my screen. Some people will complain that this isn’t the full web, to which I have to say I honestly don’t give a damn. When I’m browsing for information on my fone, I care about text, text and text. Nothing else matters. Using Google Web Transcoder, pages load faster, use less bandwidth, and that equals less frustration, less time wasted, and longer battery life.

So what else is there in Dabr? Here is what you see when you click on someone’s Twitter handle:

Here is what the replies look like:

Not going to show you directs since those are private.

Here is what search results look like, note the option to “save as default search” so that every time you click on search in Dabr, it automatically searches a particular term:

Public is a bit useless since it’s just the Twitter timeline, unfiltered:

Favorites shows me my favorites, obviously, note the yellow stars:

Followers shows me all the people who follow me in one easy to scroll through list with 100 people per page:

Friends is the same concept as followers:

The twitpic menu allows you to upload a photo to twitpic. First you click on the image field, at which point you have to bury through the S60 file structure to find an image you want to post, and then you click on the message field to type a caption:

Trends shows you the top 10 trending topics on Twitter:

Settings I’ve gone over, this is the about page:

And logout logs you out.

That’s Dabr, my favorite Twitter client on the go. I hope you like it, and start using it. I like it so much I even use it on my desktop. Why you may ask?

Here is what TweetDeck, a very common Twitter application, looks like on my 1680 x 1050 display. Notice how I can only fit 9 tweets at once per column:

Here is what Twhirl, my favorite desktop Twitter client due to the awesome notifications as seen on the right, looks like on my display. Notice how I can fit 13 tweets per column:

And finally here is what Dabr looks like on my display. Notice how I can fit a whopping 20 tweets in one single screen. Highly efficient for when I just want to pop open a new tab and see what my Twitter friends are up to:

Thanks for reading, and if you do end up liking Dabr, give some love to @davidcarrington who created it, guy really does have talent.