Review: Friendsbook – The better Facebook client!

Every smart phone on the market needs a powerful Facebook client. On the new webOS it took a quite long time until a Facebook client was available. It started with FriendsFlow and then the official client client from Palm. If you’re like me, you don’t want to pay to use Facebook and probably find the official client from Palm to be lacking. Luckily, x.facebook.com mobile website works quite well on my Pre. But the problem is that it is still a website, and there are no native functions from the Palm Pre device involved using x.facebook.com. According to the developers of Friendsbook, SIC! Software GmbH from Germany(http://www.sic-software.com/),  these were the major reasons for creating a free native Facebook client for the palm WebOS.

Friendsbook was not called “Friendsbook” at the beginning. The first named was “palmbook”. The application was first released in the www.precentral.net homebrew galley because the official Palm App Catalog did not respond after submission. As a result of the enthusiastic feedback on precentral, Palm Inc. sent a message to the developers recommending abandoning the name “palmbook”. Palm Inc. was concerned to confuse the user – since the application is not a product made by Palm. After changing the name into “Friendsbook” the application made it in the official Palm catalog without any further problems.

The main approach for the Friendsbook application is to allow a user to utilize all the primary Facebook functions in a really intuitive and fast way. The main issue in using x.facebook.com is that the site is always fully reloaded after doing some actions. This makes it slow and causes a lot of data traffic. For users without unlimited data this can mean a higher bill from your mobile service provider. The other important aspect is to have a more responsive user interface on the mobile device, which makes using Facebook on you mobile more fun.

Lets introduce some of the main features of Friendsbook.

See what’s going on and interact

If you start Friendsbook you will first of all see your “Personal Feed”. This is most important list, where you can see what your friends have been done inside Facebook. In Friendsbook you can tap every entry, which will cause to show a popup with all available interactions for the tapped icon. These options can be:

• Goto Users wall – this will redirect you automatically to the friends wall.
• Create New Comment – will show a dialog which allows you to enter a comment for the tabbed entry.
• Like this – if possible this entry gets marked as “you like this”
• Load All Comments – if there are more comments available, tabbing this will show them all.
• Remove Entry – if the selected entry was created by you, you can delete that with this option

The floating menu on the bottom allows you to do everything else you need and navigate around the app. The available commands in the personal feed are: (from left to right)

• Show news feed switcher item
• Show user wall switcher item
• Show my friend list
• More actions menu command
• Refresh this view

In the menu in the top right corner you can find:

• Shoot and Upload
• Select and Upload
• My Photos
• New Post

If you travel to a friends wall, the available commands in the friend’s wall are (from left to right):

• Add a new Post on the users wall
• Show all photo albums of this friend
• Refresh this view

Upload images with captions

Another great feature of the app is the ability to upload pictures. The screen shots are showing the “Select and Upload” feature. If you use “Shoot and Upload”, the “Input Caption” screen will follow directly after you have shot an image. With that feature you can very quickly share your moments with your friends.

Manage your notifications

On the main screen there is a number which indicates the count of the unread Facebook notifications. If you tap that number the “Notifications” screen will get displayed. There you can read and refresh your recent notifications. Just swipe a notifications entry off the screen to make the delete button visible. Tapping delete queue the notification to be marked read. If you leave the notifications screen with the back gesture, all queued notification will get marked as read. The idea here is that it allows you to mark many many items as read with only 1 http request, thus reducing network traffic.

Friendsbook is a very powerful lightweight application which allows many more features than all other Facebook clients in the Catalog. The user interface is kept as simple as possible to help keeping the focus on then essential information’s needed to quickly use Facebook on your palm!

The best of all: It is totally free!

There are a plethora of features in the application, which we didn’t detail completely. The complete feature list for the version 2.0.0 is:

• Show notification count and notification details
• Login through facebook connect
• Personal Status updates
• Display all friends
• Display your news feed
• Display your wall
• View status und details from a friend
• Display the wall from friends
• Create new Message on a wall
• Remove created message from a wall
• Create like on a wall entry
• Create comment on a wall
• Show all comments from a post
• Load more newsfeed and wall entries
• Intelligent caching to optimize application performance and data traffic
• Open videos and images from a users wall (mp4 videos not supported by palm yet)
• Open the homepage from a friend
• Display photo albums from a friend
• Display photos from a album in image viewer with caption overlay
• Upload a photo by file selection
• Upload a photo by camera shoot
• Logout