Weeks after Facebook unveiled its ambitious new Timeline design, we’re now being treated to new versions of the iPhone and iPad Facebook apps, along with a new-look version of Facebook Mobile (aka m.facebook.com).
The Facebook for iPhone app does away with the 3×3 speed dial grid of old, instead moving shortcuts to things like your News Feed, Messages, Events and the like off to one side.
A tap of the menu button in the top left corner pulls up a discreet grey sub menu where shortcust to everything have been squirrelled away. There’s a search field at the top allowing you to look for contacts as before and at the very bottom a shortcut to the settings menu.
There’s a section in the middle labelled ‘Apps’. Here’s where you’ll access Photos, Notes and Facebook Chat as normal as well as any other apps or games you’ve installed on Facebook, like Words With Friends here. On our iPhone 4, this just took us to a quick link to the App Store, where we were prompted to download the free iOS version of the game. After logging in with our Facebook profile we were able to then start a game on our iPhone through the Facebook app and carry it on on proper desktop Facebook.
This is perfect for inter-office Words With Friends bouts; start playing it on your desktop, then sneak in some double and triple word score action in the loo/when you’re supposed to be paying attention in a meeting.
iPad therefore iFacebook
The new-look iPad edition of Facebook of course has all of these new features but has been configured to take advnatage of that device’s bigger screen real estate; you get the ability to play games and run apps in full-screen mode and watch videos inline. This means you click on a shared video and instead of being carted off to YouTube, you can watch videos while remaining in Facebook, like you do on the desktop version. Facebook is saying that
Needless to say, photo albums look much nicer on the iPad as well.
What about some Android love?
Patience my Android brethren, still your beating hearts. This Facebook Developers Blog post mentions that there are new versions of the Android apps for phones and tablets coming soon that will include the app ‘bookmarking’ feature, as Facebook is calling it.
Sadly, the links going off to Android screenshots ‘page not founded’ when we clicked on them. Updates to Facebook for Android are generally not that far behind those for iOS devices; we’ll update when we hear more on this. Elsewhere, Facebook mentions that support for other mobile platforms is slated, so hopefully everyone will be happy.
Facebook Mobile revamped, support for Facebook Credits incoming
Facebook Mobile has also had a redesign which brings things more in line with the desktop edition, with support for Facebook Credits rolling out to support mobile web apps as well.
These will have to be paid for/used via the m.facebook version of the site as “Facebook Credits are not allowed in iOS apps or mobile web apps that are running within a Facebook iOS app.”
This could get a little tricky, hopping from app versions of Facebook to mobile web versions if you want to use Facebook Credits/in-app purchases to get more cash on Farmville for example.
I don’t care about Farmville. When’s Timeline coming to my iPhone?
Hopefully in a little while. Facebook has also said that Timeline is coming ‘soon’ but hasn’t elaborated any further. We’re itching to see how Timeline takes shape on our iPad and Android tablets as well as our phones.
I’ve installed the new app, but now it crashes and won’t load.
We had a little problem when we first upgraded the Facebook app this morning; after the update the app seemed to crash every time we opened it. We deleted it and reinstalled it and it works fine.
Leave a Reply