Anyone who uses a Twitter application on the iPhone has no doubt been “my app’s better than yours” debate at some point. I know I’ve been there a few times. There’s a whole bunch of them out there, and to be perfectly honest they all do pretty much the same thing, just in slightly different ways.

Well we think Tweetie 2 is about to change all that. We’ve been fortunate enough to try it out for a little while, and I can’t exclaim how impressive it’s looking at the moment. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still ‘just another twitter client’ – it’s not going to change the world – but it’s a bloody good one!

Tweeting is pretty much how you’d expect it, but to reload/refresh you just drag the list down and let it go. This ‘drag & release’ function is so intuitive, and more practical than the ‘shake to refresh’ method that’s become a bit popular (and gimmicky) as of late.

There’s the usual feature such as trends, search and nearby, but it’s the added extra touches that make them special. You can save your searches for future. Twinkle was one of the early Twitter clients, which focused on nearby tweets, Tweetie 2 brings this back with a Google map and pinpoints the locations of nearby twits. This is a really fun feature, if not a little stalker-ish. I spotted Wil Harris from Channel Flip yesterday – turns out you never know who your neighbours are until you tweet.

Adding @mentions to your tweets can be a daunting task. Spelling names incorrectly on Twitter is a little embarassing – I’ve been asking for an iPhone app with automatic name insertion for a while. Tweetie lets you select friends from a list – search by name or alias, click and insert straight into your tweet. You can even link people’s twitter names to your address book – funky! Another little touch that had be excited about user profiles is the option to enable push notifications for individual twitter names.

With Drafts, Geo-Tags and all the rest, I’m sure Tweetie 2 is going to cause a storm when it’s released – which will be as soon as Apple approve the application. At $2.99 this is a bargain. If Sporkings gave scores on our reviews, I’d give this app a 5/5.

Checkout a few more screenshots here.