If there is one social network that came out of nowhere during the past few years to become one of the most talked about services this side of the moon it’s most definitely Twitter. Thanks to the way the service was built anyone could build a client to interact with their backend, freeing you from having to experience Twitter in the same uniform way across multiple platforms. One client, Gravity for Nokia’s Symbian platform, stands head and shoulders above the rest, and not only because it’s built by a single person, but because it’s constantly upgraded with new features and also supports other social networks such as Facebook and Foursquare.
Jan Ole Suhr, the sole developer behind Gravity, released the first alpha of version 1.5 as a Christmas present for the socially addicted and with it comes a brand spanking new portrait virtual QWERTY keyboard, replacing the mandatory landscape keyboard that Nokia has promised to update in early 2011. There’s also an improved full screen view that’s more visually appealing thanks to the use of rounded corners and other such design tricks.
If there’s one thing Gravity shows developers, it’s that building a gorgeous Symbian application is entirely possible and doesn’t take a lot of effort. Sales of Gravity have skyrocketed and allowed Jan to live a modest lifestyle, using his spare time to answer tweets that ask for feature requests or notify him of bugs. We wish Jan would release his app for Android or the iPhone, but competing with the already plentiful selection of Twitter clients for both those platforms would prove time consuming and a futile effort since he seems to have the Symbian platform all to himself. No competition = extra revenue.
Do you have a Nokia N8 or other Symbian^3 device to test this on? Give it a go and let us know in the comments below how it goes. Fair warning: this is an alpha, so expect some crashes!
[Via: All About Symbian who also has more screenshots]