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I recently learned, via Twitter of course, that a new Twitter app is available for the iPhone. Shocking I know, another Twitter app, however in this case it may be worth a second look. The app is called Reportage and according to the description, it is a “radically different Twitter client.” Of course, even at first glance that was a statement I was able to agree with.

Given that, I ponied up another $2.99 and purchased the app. Lets hope it proves worthy. Anyway, back to how Reportage works…

The app allows you to see the people that you follow based on their icons as opposed to a timeline view, which is under the “World” view. Your friends appear with their regular Twitter icon along with a little number in the top right that shows you how many unread tweets you have from them.

Moving on there is also a section called “Stars” which is where you can view your favorite Tweeters. Similar to the “World” view, this also displays them by their user icon with an unread message count. Additionally, Reportage also has a “Local” section that breaks down by either 1, 5 or 15 miles and a section for your username. The section for your username consists of a sub-section for Public and Private tweets. The private tweets are your DM’s and the public tweets are messages that you have sent as well as messages that others have sent with your name. Finally, you can also use Reportage to send tweets as well as images (that are posted to YFrog).

Basically, I am not sure Reportage will be able to replace Tweetie and/or Twitterific. However, it may be useful as a second Twitter app and in turn help to minimize my received text messages. You see, I have always had two sets of people that I follow. There are those that I want to follow and then those that I do not want to miss anything from, I guess the latter could be considered as my favorites. So, my solution was to use an iPhone app as well as having my favorites sent via text message.

Reportage allows you to have a favorites section that is easily found and more importantly easily used. I can see this serving as a replacement for my text messages. If nothing else AT&T may be happy, it would save them in the ballpark of around 12,000 messages per month.

Also, just so I don’t give you the impression that Reportage is perfect, there are a few items that bug me. First, although I may be in the minority here, but support for multiple Twitter accounts would be nice. Additionally, the app does not seem to auto-update. In other words even when I launch the app, it seems like I need to hit the refresh button each time.

So far I have been playing with Reportage for only a short while, but can say that it seems like it will be a well spent $2.99.

[Reportage (App Store link)]