[App of the Week] Smartr

If you use Twitter on a regular basis you will have noticed that finding relevant news isn’t exactly easy. Your timeline tends to be populated by wise-crack quotes, thought bubbles and check-in updates. Searching worthwhile tweets with relevant links easily approaches the limits of his patience. A solution for this problem is now provided with the free app Smartr von Factyle, Inc.

The app looks for tweets with links and sorts out check-in junk. This works quite well. As the timeline isn’t showing the tweets but the link content you really get the feel of consuming news. Users can change between a reduced display of headlines only and an extended version with image and teaser text. Switching happens through the well accustomed pinch-to-zoom gesture when you are in timeline view. Easy.

Version 1.5, released yesterday, also allows viewing the original, unfiltered twitter timeline by clicking a single button in the middle of the top navigation.

To account for typical Twitter use patterns all common features like @-replies, retweets and favorites are available as well. It’s even possible to write your own tweets, which turns Smartr into a Twitter client by itself. Yet, for regular use we rather recommend the usual suspects of the Twitter for iPhone, Seesmic or Tweetdeck breed.

Articles are opened within the app, which avoids the sometimes annoying switch to Safari. Small bugs appear here and there. So it happened to me that a BitRebels article only showed the author information instead of the article itself.

After authorizing the services in the settings you can share articles on Tumblr, Posterous and Facebook or send them via Email. Should you use Instapaper or Read it Later you can easily send articles to those, too. If that isn’t the case, just mark them in the app to go back and have a look later.

Tweeps who like to see Twitter as news channels really should consider this app. I really like it. Watch the video below for a short round-up.

Data sheet:

Price: – free

System: – iOS min. 4.0

Size: – 1,6MB

Language: – English

Advertisements: – no

optimized for Retina Display (iPhone4): – yes

Multitasking: – yes

Universal-App: – no

Push-notifications: – no

Download:
Appstore

Screenshots

SdP