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Category: Social Networking
Developer: Facebook, Inc
Minimum Requirements: iPhone OS 3.0
Compatibility: iPhone and iPod Touch
File Size: 1.3 MB
Price: Free
Availability: Now
Version Reviewed: 3.0

After a short wait, Apple has reviewed and accepted the Facebook 3.0 App Store application for user in the general public. This update brings many features that the Facebook website has had for a while, and changes the interface dramatically…in a good way. Overall, it is a great improvement upon the older application, which I found to be buggy and feature-lacking at times, in comparison to updates on the website.

The application now uses pages with large icons on them for the main view. The icons can be used to see your profile, inbox, events, and other Facebook pages. Furthermore, by scrolling to more pages (much like the iPhone home screens), you can add icons to friends’ pages that you visit very often. Also, notifications will now slide up in a nice toolbar along the bottom of the screen. By tapping on them, you are brought to a page that shows all of your notifications and makes it extremely easy to act upon them. Notifications that haven’t been viewed show up as a badge on the home screen.

In the previous versions of the application, you weren’t even able to “Like” items, just comment on them. This update adds the ability to “Like” items. which is a nice addition I’ll use often. On top of that, you can now search your Facebook friends and pages inside of the application. And with another new feature, you can sort what you see by network and other options much like in the top left hand corner of the main Facebook web page.

I have experienced some bugs with the application; when searching, for example, the cancel button in the top right appears to give an “Are you sure you want to logout?” message as if it is simply overlapping that button. However, Joe Hewitt, the developer of the application, is already working on them, as made apparent by Twitter posts such as “Apple limits us to 100 beta testers - you find a lot more bugs when a few million people use the app then when 100 people use it.” Expect to see a 3.01 release as soon as Apple approves it. However, don’t let that stop you from updating to this version, as it is much, much improved.