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Friendcaster Tab for Android: Facebook for Honeycomb tablets

If you’ve spent any amount of time with a Honeycomb device then you’ll probably have noticed that the standard Facebook for Android app, the one available for pretty much every Android phone, isn’t available to download.

This isn’t a terribly immediate problem, as you can you can log in to Facebook proper through the Honeycomb web browser, and you get a pretty similar experience to the real thing. You can upload photos, update statuses and poke people all directly from the browser.

That said, it’s not quite as fluid as we’d like, nor is it especially fast over 3G. Plus, you get all those annoying ads clogging up the sides so it’s probably not that data-friendly. Facebook Chat doesn’t work properly as you can’t scroll down through your list of available friends. At the moment, you can only Chat with friends whose first names are in the upper tiers of the alphabet.

FriendCaster Tab for Android then is your next port of call. It’s currently your best bet if you want some semblance of app-based Facebook action on your Honeycomb tablet.

Though there’s not an option to indulge in some Facebook Chat action yet, we love the layout which is formatted specifically for Honeycomb devices.

The grid of friends photos is visually pleasing and we like that when you tap on someone’s icon, their profile details pop up in the right hands column. You can view people’s check ins, with the secondary panel using Google Maps while checking in yourself.

You’ve also got the option of uploading images either directly from your tablet’s gallery or taking a pic using your tablet’s camera(s).

It’s a pretty decent replacement for the usual Facebook for Android app and is free to download from the Market so it’s at least worth a quick look. Things we’d love to see in future updates include the ability to integrate Facebook Events with the Google Calendar (which you can kind of already do on the Galaxy Tab 10.1) support for the all-important Facebook Chat.

Improvements could be made for the photo tagging option (you long-press on someone you want to tag and the app then pulls up your friends list) which didn’t seem to work that well for us.

All the same, we love FriendCaster Tab for bringing some semblance of Facebook normality to our Honeycomb devices.

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