The damn thing didn’t work for me no matter what I tried at first. Yeah, I may not have the latest and greatest, coolest phone but it does have WM6. I own a T-mobile Shadow and according to the download page it should work for my phone… so what did I do? I downloaded it, installed it, and ran it. I input my login credentials and waited… and waited.. even turned on Wi-fi… did that work? Nope…
So today I started looking around. I went to the Facebook page for the application and it had links to the download on microsoft.com and also to the Windows Moble blog. I hadn’t been to the blog in a long time so I thought maybe they may have something. And what do you know? The blog says this:
“You’ll want to uninstall the old application and then make sure that the facebook.vol and fbmail.vol files are deleted from your root directory before reinstalling.”
Well how come no one told me that? It isn’t instructed on any of the official pages but only on the blog, unless I missed it. So, off I went to delete the files and started up Facebook for Windows Mobile. It WORKED!!!!
Now for the review. The app overall is pretty solid. As you figured above I tried a previous beta version and it worked ok before. There were several rough edges. Right off the bat the Facebook for Windows Mobile app was SLLOOOWWWW. I do not know if it is just going around updating all my content or what. It has everything that you expect from Facebook.. mail, status updates, your Facebook phonebook, etc. In addition to the usual it also lets you upload photos and videos to Facebook. Definitely a bonus, but is that lone feature enough to install the application? I do not think so. The mobile Facebook site is a pleasure to use. It is laid out simply, beautifully and allows access to all the features of Facebook that you typically use, and all the features that are here except for the photo and video upload. I do not need the ability to upload photos though. I have ping.fm tied to my Facebook account. All I do is fire off an email with a picture attached to my ping.fm account and it automatically uploads to Facebook, skipping an application interface all together. At first the application seemed snappy once it downloaded what it needed to, but then when I moved to the mail tab that it hadn’t downloaded content for the Windows Mobile hourglass popped up and the app became unresponsive. After finally downloading the mail it was back to being quick again.
I am going to have to play with it for a few more days to give a good definitive answer on whether this app is needed on my phone. As I have said the mobile Facebook is simple and effective. Time will tell if I need the ability to upload photos and videos, the one redeeming quality of the application. This is NOTHING like the iphone version of the application.
All in all, the app is good looking for a Windows Mobile application, but that isn’t saying much. It gives all the functionality you would expect, but misses a few things. It could have a Today screen plugin so you could see how many messages you have or maybe a friend feed. This would make it immensely useful and a sure install, but til that happens, I have to give it 3 stars out of 4. It would score four if it had a Today screen plugin… I will be sure to follow up on this review with a thumbs-up/down.
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