It's the end of a busy couple of days in the mobile phone world, an entire new operating system has hit the shelves on a range of devices. Windows Phone 7 isn’t merely an update of Windows Mobile -it’s an entirely different thing. It incorporates Facebook to some degree, perhaps giving you enough of that “glance and go” experience, with updates and photos appearing in your People Hub.
But sometimes that’s just not enough. Sometimes you want to go a little deeper, immerse yourself in the world of Facebook, the social network. So it only sees fitting to give the App of the Day over to Facebook on Windows Phone 7.
- FORMAT
- Windows Phone 7
- PRICE
- free
- WHERE
- Marketplace
Most Facebook mobile apps are practically the same - Android? iPhone? Pretty much the same experience. Windows Phone 7, however, has an ace up its sleeve.
Much of the look and feel of Windows Phone 7 takes advantage of panoramic pages, so rather than entering a section and then going back to the previous page, you can swipe through the different sections. Take your Profile page in Facebook for example - Android and iPhone both offer tabs for Wall, Info and Photos. Windows Phone 7 lets you swipe through wall, info, albums, photos of me and pages. Yes, it’s the same stuff, but it looks so much better.
From the main page you can swipe across to “top news” (including posting your own update), photos, which draws from new updates of your friends and throws in some of your old photos for good measure, events and notifications.
In each area you can click through, Like things, post comments and have a merry old time. With news and photos being live content, you can also enable a “shake to update” option – if you have a vociferous bunch of friends, it’s a cool way of getting to latest info on the screen.
Tags show up in photos too, so you not only get the option of pinch zooming, but you can also hit a tag and view that person’s page.
When updating you can bang out photos, either from your phone’s memory or direct from the camera, although WP7 lets you do this in the People Hub too, so there is some duplication of functionality.
You can also search for people, so you can search friends, or search everyone, with context related results returning friends of friends, rather than just random strangers. What seems to be missing is the cool “mutual friends” information that you get from the Facebook Mobile site so you can figure out if you have the right person or not.
Plenty of fun, Facebook for Windows Phone gets a thumbs-up from us: it is stylish, easy to use and gives you pretty much everything you’ll need, but as yet there is no sign of Facebook Places.
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