Mini-Review of Facebook for Windows Mobile: It Rocks

Yesterday Microsoft announced the availability of the first Facebook application for Windows Mobile 6 (and greater), and so far we’re digging it. After installing the application from Microsoft’s Web site we entered in our user name and password and about 10 seconds later were greeted with our Home page news feed. Here you can view your friend’s status updates, comment on them, add videos, and add photos. The whole user interface is very quick; we had reservations after testing an early beta of the software that lagged frequently. If you click “Photos” from the home page, you can view a list of recently tagged or uploaded photos. We wish each was larger–they are only a few pixels by a few pixels–and that the list was more compact. You’ll be doing a lot of scrolling to see the latest updates. Read on for more thoughts. If you click the Profile tab you can view your own wall and recent status updates, as well as update your status. If you choose to upload a video, you can select to begin recording it right from the application itself, which is handy. The message inbox is exactly what you’d expect. You can view messages, send messages, and check friend requests and notifications. You’re alerted by a small red icon on the message box whenever you have new mail. Unlike the BlackBerry version, you aren’t alerted on the desktop or outside the application. You have to open Facebook to see if you have updates. The final icon is a telephone, and it pulls all of your friend’s phone numbers and lists them in alphabetical order. If you click a number, you can choose to call or send a message. It would have been super useful if the option to “add to address book” existed; but it doesn’t. At least you can quickly get numbers for friends without creating an “I lost my phone,” group. Overall the app is excellent. There hasn’t been a decent Facebook application for Windows Mobile in the past and there’s a lot of features for a first round.  Now that Google Maps with Latitude is opened up for developers, tight integration with it for viewing the location of friends would be a drool worthy feature in the future.  Also, integration with our phone’s address book and calendar, so that our friend’s Profile picture came up when they called and so our phone would alert us of upcoming Facebook events. Both of those features are available on the BlackBerry version. Excellent first-time-around app, though, and it’s well worth the download.