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This was the 2nd application that I downloaded for the iPhone when I got back into the game. I don’t have a bunch of time at work or at home to sit on the Facebook page reading, replying, and such. I figured throwing Facebook on my iPhone would be perfect.

I downloaded 3.02 and immediately I was surprised. It’s not some watered down app that uses a bunch of calls to the browser to show data. I quickly set up my account and got to work.

The focal point of the Facebook app is the grid as I call it (above). It provides links to your news feed, profile, friends, inbox, chat, requests, events, photos, and notes. You can slide to the right for your favorites page too.

The news feed page brings you to the combined feed for all your Facebook friends. It’s almost like Twitter now, but with no 140 char limit. You can like or dislike the items in the feed and you can comment on them too. You can also update your status by “typing in the what’s on your mind?” area.

The next tab is the profile tab. Te screens above show the info presented in each of the tabs within your profile. You’ve got your wall, info, and photo tabs.

Here is the friends tab. You can check out your friends and pages that you follow here.

From the friends tab (and other places within the app), you can select a friend to do more. Their wall tab shows just their wall posts and you can post onto their wall from here too. The next table is the info tab. I can see more info about my friend Matt. You can see that we have 76 friends in common too. Cool. The last tab is the photos tab. You can check out your friends photos here. You can drill down into the albums and view them wonderfully on your iPhone.

Next up, we have your inbox tab (above left). You can read and reply in a threaded format to messages you’ve received. The tab at the bottom indicates unread messages. The updates tab shows updates from fan pages and companies you follow. The sent tab is just that, the messages you’ve sent others. The middle screen above show a chat session. When you click on the chat icon, you are presented with a list of your friends online and it shows a green indicator if they are available and a grey indication if they are away. The threaded chat looks just like your SMS threaded chats. The far right screenshot shows the requests tab. As you can see, I have no friend requests at this time. You can approve or disapprove requests here.

The events icon takes you to where you can view events and birthdays. I really love the birthdays part. I can see who has them coming up soon. The photos tab brings you to where you can look at and administer your own photos. You can create new albums and upload items to them or to existing albums. Finally, the last tab is the notes tab. Useless in my eyes, but for those that use notes, it seems just fine.

Finally, if you look again at the grid view above, you will see that I have sent a new notification to Dan Simpson. If you click the bar it is posted on, it will take you to a list of notifications as seen on the right.

A notable feature that is not widely publicized is the ability to post video directly from the application. Click the screenshot above for one I posted while writing this review.

Wrap Up

The Facebook ver 3.02 application is top notch and offers plenty of functionality. It’s not watered down, it’s fast, and it offers many ways to interact with your Facebook friends. It’s the best version of Facebook I have looked at on any platform and it blows away earlier versions for the iPhone I previously tried.

The value of the Facebook app is a no brainer. You don’t always get what you paid for. In this case you get much more than you paid for. Free + Awesome = Awesomely free. This is a must have application for anyone that has an iPhone and uses Facebook, even if you barely use Facebook.

Pros:

• Free
• Full of features
• Constant updates bring great new funcionality
• Chat and Messages help keep you updated on the go

Cons:

• Can’t play Mafia Wars for Facebook with it. :)

This review is part of our 50 app reviews in 50 days series. To check out the others, click here.