This past holiday weekend (for those of us in the US), I decided to give jailbreaking another chance on my iPhone 3G.

What prompted it? Well, when my stock iPhone lost all connectivity to AT&T ‘s network, and no amount of rebooting or reinserting the SIM card would help, AT&T finally suggested I perform a full restore and go from there. I figured if I was going through the trouble of restoring, I might as well play around with jailbreak since I ‘ve been reading about some pretty cool apps over on Installer Apps.

One of those apps is called qTweeter from Efiko, which Patrick took a look at back in April. qTweeter, available for jailbroken iPhones only, provides the simplest way to update your Twitter and Facebook status, from within any app. Once installed, you simply swipe your finger down from the status bar and it pulls down a text bubble that hovers over whatever else you have open, allowing you to quickly type something, choose which status you want to update, and hit the send button. Once sent, the bubble disappears back up above the status bar with beautiful animation.

While qTweeter is not a full blown Twitter or Facebook app, and provides no ability to read or respond to other messages, it does provide the quickest and simplest way to update without having to launch yet another app. It also provides a tie-in to Twitpic or Twitvid, allowing you to upload pictures or video with your status update, along with URL shortening built-in.

I ‘ve found myself preferring to use qTweeter over launching the full blown Twitterrific Premium for those times I just want to share what ‘s on my mind, or something that ‘s just popped into my head. Being able to quickly share something on Twitter while in the middle of another app, without having to quit and then reopen anything, is quite nice.

I also have SBSettings installed into my status bar, and qTweeter plays very well with it. I can swipe my finger horizontally across the status bar, or tap simultaneously on the 3G and battery icons to invoke SBSettings, while sliding my finger down vertically from the status bar into the app icons to bring up qTweeter. I ‘ve not once accidentally launched SBSettings while intending to bring up qTweeter, or vice versa.

qTweeter is available in the Cydia App Store for $4.99, and while more than some other Twitter apps, is well worth it in my opinion. You can install the full version and try it out for up to 15 tweets before having to purchase it, so you can see for yourself how well it works. I ‘m certainly very pleased, and glad to have taken the plunge (again) into the iPhone jailbroken underworld.

You can also watch a short YouTube video demonstration of qTweeter in action here.

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