Twitter Finally Launches Official Tablet App for Android, Exclusive to Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1

For years now Twitter has offered their official Twitter for iOS official client in two flavors – an iPhone/iPod touch version, and an exclusive iPad version highly optimized for the iPad’s much larger screen. Unfortunately for many frustrated Android users, Twitter has been extremely slow to launch a similarly tablet optimized version of their Android client, forcing owners of Android tablets to have to settle with a blown up version of the smartphone application which in no way took advantage of the larger screens tablets have to offer. This was particularly an issue for tablets with large, 10″ displays, but if you have your eye on one of Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition devices, you’re in for a treat – Twitter has partnered with Samsung and has announced a new, tablet optimized version of Twitter for Android, and it’s coming first exclusively to Samsung’s new tablet.

In landscape view, the new application displays your timeline on the left hand side of the screen with trending topics and search functionality in a column on the right hand side. Tap a link, photo, or video and the right hand side will display the content unobtrusively right next to your timeline. It appears to be a far, far better experience than that which Android tablet users had to contend with before and seems to do an excellent job of taking advantage of the Note 10.1’s widescreen aspect ratio. Twitter also notes that the new app fully supports some of Samsung’s TouchWiz functionality, including multi-window view and drawing on the screen with the S Pen.

Now, what about all of you proud owners of some of those other Android tablets, like say, a perfectly good shiny new Nexus 7? You might be in luck sooner or later – Twitter has confirmed that the new app will be coming to “other Android tablets by the end of the year.” Twitter’s next step, however, appears to be bringing the new app over to other Samsung tablets before allowing anyone else to get their hands on it – though I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising Android enthusiasts managed to get this working on your non-Samsung tablet a little sooner than Twitter might like.