I had an early look at Hahlo 3.0, an extensive update of the popular Twitter iPhone client, and I am impressed. I generally move between the “Standard” (not mobile) version of Twitter and Hahlo on my iPhone. Neither has everything I need (and Twitter standard crashes like crazy.)

The goal of a mobile client is to replicate the functionality of the desktop client, but with the mobile footprint and limitations in mind. If an iPhone-based client can improve over its web-based original, all the better. Hahlo may well be on its way to doing that.

The layout of the “With Friends” timeline is a clean, compact, easy-to-read interpretation of the standard Twitter interface. No offense, but Twitter’s aw shucks user interface could take some hints from Hahlo.

The new version overcomes what I think was the major issue with the previous version: Hahlo defaulted to a menu whenever you accessed or refreshed the URL, instead of loading a page of the latest updates from your friends. It was awkward and took too many clicks to view your friends’ updates. This has been fixed, and you can now set Hahlo to default to this screen.

There’s also a great settings screen, that properly follows the iPhone user interface, and allows the user to set a number of preferences, including the option to default to the Friend’s Timeline screen.

Not only that, but Hahlo 3.0 auto-refreshes the Friends Timeline, something Twitter should have implemented a long time ago.

According to Dean Robinson, creator of Hahlo, some additional improvements and features in Hahlo 3.0 include:

• @ replies to you are now highlighted in green in the timeline
• Any #hashtags will be linked to a timeline for that tag, powered by summize.com
• Tweet searching is available directly from the Hahlo 3.0 menu

I did experience a couple of crashes during testing, but no more frequent than those I have had with Twitter standard version on my iPhone. In general this is a solid update that will probably replace Twitter on my iPhone. The only feature Hahlo does not support, which was also unsupported in the previous version, is the ability to scroll back through more than 20 tweets on the timeline, apparently a limitation of the Twitter API.

Tags: twitter, hahlo 3.0, iPhone, client, web-based, Safari, summize