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The official Twitter client is free, stable and fairly feature-rich, but with the wealth of apps, you'd be crazy to not at least see what's available elsewhere, and so we've unearthed what we think are the best Twitter clients for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

1. Twitter (free, universal)

On the iPhone, Twitter is an evolved version of top Twitter client Tweetie, rebranded when the service bought out the developer. It's a simple, elegant app that ably does its job.

On the iPad, you'd at first glance be forgiven for thinking you'd launched an entirely different app, such is the change in interface. While divisive, Twitter's pane-based swipe-oriented approach proves usable and efficient once you're used to it, although the iPad version oddly lacks the ability to create lists (which it has when running on the iPhone) and supports a relatively limited range of services.

2. Echofon (free with ads or £2.99 for 'pro', universal)

Plain and simple, Echofon is great if you just want fast access to content, and unlike Twitter it's similar in use across devices.

A big plus for Echofon is its ability to sync unread tweets between installs across mobile and desktop platforms, but it lets itself down a bit with occasional crashes on iPhone when sending emails and loading the in-app browser.

3. Twitterrific (free/£2.99 for 'pro', universal)

At one point, Twitterrific was feature-packed but becoming more complex with every update. The developers bravely stripped everything back and started again. The result is an impressively usable and great-looking client - although you'll need to pay to go 'pro' on each device you want multiple accounts on.

4. Twittelator Pro (£2.99, separate apps)

Seemingly taking the baton from Twitterrific in terms of complexity, the iPhone version of Twittelator Pro is feature-rich, with great search, theming and drafting capabilities.

On the iPad version, theming is gone and there's a lot of wasted screen space, but the two-pane interface is usable, and in-stream images are handled deftly, although the lack of a built-in web browser is annoying.

5. Osfoora (£1.79 for iPhone, £2.39 for iPad)

It's one of the pricier clients and the default black theme is a bit harsh, but Osfoora (iPhone version, iPad version) has a good crack at marrying a clean efficient interface with plenty of features.

It's particularly worthy of consideration for anyone who wants a more flexible client than Twitter or Twitterrific, more stability than Echofon has to offer, and an app with better screen usage than Twittelator Pro on iPad.

6. TwitBird (free/£1.19 for 'premium'/£1.79 for 'pro', universal)

Oddly available in three flavours (ad-supported 'free'; two-account ad-free 'premium'; 16-account ad-free 'pro'), TwitBird is fully-featured, with some interesting themes and ideas.

The grid-based Espresso theme provides navigation akin to the Facebook app (which works nicely, and is more flexible than the standard toolbar model), and the client automatically placing the original tweet under a reply is useful.

7. HelTweetica (free, iPad-only)

HelTweetica is an iPad-only release which aims to be a "clean and modern take on the Twitter client app" and largely succeeds. It packs a lot of tweets into a small space, although this results in slightly fiddly buttons for performing various tasks. However, the app is fast and also has an efficient single-user view that automatically loads the user's recent tweets.

8. TweetDeck/TweetDeck for iPad (free, separate apps)

Aiming to bring the column-based Twitter client to iOS devices, TweetDeck (iPhone version, iPad version) is worth a look if you're married to the desktop version. It's great for sync and flexible personalisation, although be warned that this client is buggy and crashes quite often.

9. HootSuite (free, universal)

After a hateful enforced sign-up to the HootSuite service, the HootSuite appproves interesting. With its column-based approach, HootSuite almost resembles TweetDeck, providing the means to rapidly switch between feed types and lists, or columns with tweets based around sets of keywords. On iPad, the sidebar provides even quicker access to default and user-defined columns.

10. Flipboard (free, iPad only)

It's certainly not the most obvious means of browsing Twitter, but if you're more interested in linked content than 140-character notes from friends,Flipboard turns the service into a digital magazine. It also links with Google Reader and Facebook.