It's been a busy week for Pinterest. First of all it announced that it was opening it doors to everyone following an extended Beta phase, and then it launched new iPad and Android apps.
Mobile has proved to be an extremely important growth area for social networks, with research from inMobi showing that social apps are the second most-popular activity on smartphones behind search.
Facebook has clocked up more than 500m mobile users while more than 60% of Twitter's 140m active members access the service via mobile devices.
So does it offer a decent mobile experience? I tried out its new Android app using a Samsung Galaxy S2...
Usability
The app offers a scaled down version of the desktop site including all of the same functionality and tools.
There are three tabs that contain the search function, timeline and user profile. You can easily switch between each one by swiping or clicking on the header.
The timeline displays pins in two columns, which makes browsing simple and means you can see up to four pins on-screen at the same time.
Even when using 3G pins I found that pins generally look less than a second to load, which is a much quicker than the painful loading times you suffer when using Facebook's Android app.
One of the most important functions for the app to get right is repinning and Pinterest has done a great job of making it a simple, two-click process.
Creating a new pin is also simple and can be done either by taking a photo within the app or importing an image from the phone's gallery.
Finally, the search tab includes all the same categories as the desktop site with each one presented as a large icon. This makes browsing and discovering new pins extremely easy.
Conclusion
As mentioned, social is one of the top three activities on mobile so it's very important for Pinterest's long-term future.
Thankfully Pinterest has done a great job of modifying its desktop experience for mobile, offering a slick, user-friendly app that is great for killing time and browsing pins while on the move.
Pinning and repinning is extremely easy and load times are short even when using 3G
As with Twitter, Pinterest's desktop site offers fairly limited functionality so it is relatively easy to scale it down for mobile, unlike Facebook which has struggled to combine all its features into one usable app.
But even so, Pinterest should be applauded for creating a great mobile experience that should help increase its membership and number of active users.
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