It took nearly two weeks for Apple to review, Facebook’s totally revamped 3.0 application is finally live on the App Store. You can download it now here.
Note: The store currently shows that the app is version 2.5, but if you click the Download button anyway you’ll get the new version. It’s Apple’s caching issue, ignore that.
What’s New ?
The new update completely upgrades the Facebook iPhone app, still the #1 most popular application in the iTunes store. This upgrade was absolutely essential. While Facebook 2.5 allowed you to browse your friends, update your status, check your notifications, and use Facebook Chat, that’s really all it could do.
The new application brings a big list of new features, making it what may be the most useful app on the App Store.
Among the additions are Events, which have frustratingly been omitted from previous versions. Now you’ll be able to look up where your Events are, and you can also respond to them and see which of your friends are attending (for anyone who has ever had to boot up the web version of the site just to look up an Event address, this is a big deal). You can also post video directly to the site if you have an iPhone 3GS — a feature that will likely see the number of videos on Facebook increase dramatically.
Smaller changes include a News Feed that more closely reflects the feed you’ll find on the main Facebook site, as well as the ability to “Like” items your friends have created.
Joe Hewitt, the developer of the Facebook iPhone App, actually has a list of new features and improvements posted last week. Here’s what’s in store for you when you open up Facebook 3.0:
– See your upcoming Events and RSVP
– See your friends’ birthdays
– See Pages and post updates and photos to Pages you administer
– Write Notes and read your friends’ Notes
– Upload videos from an iPhone 3GS
– Upload photos to any album
– Complete photo management (create albums, delete albums, delete photos, delete photo tags)
– Change your Profile Picture
– Zoom into photos – Like posts and photos
– See the same News Feed as the Facebook website
– Visit links in a built-in web browser
– See all of your friends’ friends and Pages
– See mutual friends
– Easily search for people and Pages
– Make friend requests
– Become a fan of Pages
– Quickly call or text your friends
– Create shortcuts to your favorite friends and Pages
– Friends sorted by first or last name according to your settings
– Chat friends sorted alphabeticaly
One feature that users will be missing is Push Notifications, which
we suspect will be rolled out in version 3.1, which Hewitt, the App Developer, is already working on. There will also be support for landscape mode in the upcoming release, and we may also see support for the ability to watch Facebook videos from the phone (right now you can only upload them).
Speed
This is one another segment which has improved over the 2.5. Posting images, switching tabs, posting messages, everything is faster.
A simple image upload which took 9 seconds on Facebook 2.5 to upload took around 5seconds on Facebook 3
Browsing Image galleries are also faster, zooming in and out are smoother and cool. I remember earlier it used to get nasty slow while brwsing galleries at times, but 3.0 tackles that issue.
Overall
Pretty Feature full and faster Facebook app. Definitely, It had been a worth wait.
loading...
loading...