Last week, Hidden Pineapple's rowi, one of Windows Phone's more popular third party Twitter clients, was updated to version 3.0, with a focus on Windows Phone 8 specific features and optimisations. Updates include a reworked Live Tile implementation, optimisations for Windows Phone 8's new screen resolutions, support for voice commands, and improved performance (faster start-up, fast resume, smoother scrolling).

rowi stands out from other Twitter clients for its simple and clean interface. It may not be as feature laden as some of its competition, but it's clear the design of every element of the app has been very carefully considered, with an over-reaching goal of providing an intutive and platform design lanugage compliant user experience.

rowi's Live Tile has been redesigned and now combines information about new messages and mentions with the app's distinctive icon. The black styling may not be to everyone's taste, but it's certainly eye catching. It also now support both the small and the double wide tile sizes that were introduced in Windows Phone 8. Similarly the app now fully support of Windows Phone 8's new screen resolutions, which is particularly good news for HTC 8X users.

More universally welcome is the improved performance. Partly that's down to being a fully "native" Windows Phone app, but the removal of the app's splash screen and support for fast resume (app returns to last position when open from start screen or app list) are also important factors. The end result is a very fast Twitter client, which puts the official Twitter app in the shade.

Windows Phone Store description:

Rowi is an easy to use Twitter app for Windows Phone with a clean and simple interface.

Whether you are a serious Twitter user or a beginner, this is the app for you! Instead of focusing on a big list of features, we built Rowi with the overall experience in mind. You’ll find Rowi has a simple, streamlined, easy to use Metro interface that feels like it’s part of Windows Phone. It performs better than any other Twitter app today.

Rowi can be downloaded from the Windows Phone Store. There are two version: the free, ad-supported, rowi [lite] and the paid for rowi. The paid version costs £1.29 / $1.40 / €1.49 and, as well as being ad-free, has optional push notifications for mentiones and messages.

The new version 3.0 is for Windows Phone 8 only, the Windows Phone 7.5 version remains on version 2.1.