One.vu Review

One.vu is designed to combine Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn feeds into one manageable feed - saving both time and effort. Does it manage to do that and more? Well, kind of.

Once users have signed into their respective accounts they can take their pick from a large selection of news sources. Personally, I think it would have been a good addition to include some of the most breaking news stories in with the social feed, but alas they are grouped separately under the News tab. The Birthdays tab is particularly helpful however, and I can say that as someone who is terrible at remembering them.

Users can post to Twitter and Facebook simultaneously through One.vu, and even surpass the Twitter character limit if they so desire. While scrolling through the customizable feed, users can click on a post to interact with it. They cannot, however, look at that user's full profile, nor can they look at any of the previous comments made by Twitter users. The Messages/Notifications tab is Facebook-exclusive too, which makes One.vu feel all the more underdeveloped and counter-intuitive.

I tried One.vu on both my iPhone and my iPad Mini, and I have to admit that it felt slightly too large on the latter. Some customization options are definitely missing here. Although One.vu makes pictures really stand out, it does so in a way that is over-facing. They use up too much of the screen space, and without the option to customize their size (or the font for that matter) it reduces the whole experience to a bit of a scroll-fest. Whether or not I want to see so-and-so's "Ibiza pics 2013" photo album should be my choice. I don't need that awfulness thrust in my face.

One.vu is certainly an attractive and practical way to view multiple social networks at a time, and I liked the implementation of both news stories and the birthday calendar, but it lacks some basic functionality necessary to make it a replacement for the original apps it collects. I found myself going back to the official apps pretty quickly, and I don't think I'll be the only one to do so.