Facebook for iPhone review

Facebook is one of those concepts that is unbelievably simple but has gone on to become even more popular than its creators could ever have envisaged. Sweeping through the social networking landscape like an unstoppable tide, it’s now the portal of choice for those net-savvy individuals who want to keep in touch with friends but can’t be bothered to actually meet up or phone them.

Putting aside the rather depressing after-effects of Facebook’s near-omnipotent popularity, it’s certainly something that smartphone manufacturers have been keen to include in their products; Facebook connectivity is practically a requirement if you’re planning to sell a phone these days.

Predictably, the iPhone has one of the best Facebook clients going, although it should be noted that this latest version is a massive improvement on the initial offering. While it doesn’t offer all the functions present on the main Facebook site, it presents the most useful options and serves as the perfect stop-gap for those moments when you’re not within arm’s reach of a computer.

The main screen of the iPhone Facebook app is your news feed, which will be instantly familiar if you’re a heavy user of the social networking service. Here, all the comments, photos and links posted by your contacts are displayed, ensuring that you’re up to date on all the exciting (and sometimes not so exciting) events that occur in their lives.

Tapping the top-left of the screen opens up the main menu, which is arranged in a friendly icon-based grid. Here you can view your own profile, look at your contacts list, peruse your inbox for new messages, view your friend requests, take a look at upcoming events and investigate your photos.

What’s more, you can customise this menu to certain extent by adding shortcuts to your favourite friends or particular pages which you visit often.

In addition to this, there’s a notifications bar at the bottom of the screen which flashes up new and important messages. Tapping this will take you to the relevant portion of the app; so, for example, if a friend comments on your status, you’ll be told about it here. Tap the notification and you’ll be able to reply instantly.

When you consider you can also upload photos using this application and engage in live chat with friends, you begin to realise that it’s the perfect way to experience Facebook on the move. It’s streamlined, attractive, reliable and – possibly best of all – reassuringly familiar.

As the main Facebook site improves and evolves over time you’ll naturally start to miss features that aren’t present here, but we’d argue that Facebook for iPhone is as good as it needs to be. Adding any more content is only going to make it more complicated, and turning such a clean and uncluttered app into a bloated mess is the last thing that the developers should be aiming to do.

If you can’t bear to be out of the Facebook loop for a second of the day then this really is an essential download. To top it all off, it’s offered entirely free of charge. The only cost is your freedom, because once you have 24 hour access to this Internet phenomenon, it’s almost impossible to leave it alone.