You've got your iPad and you're ready for Facebook, but wait. There's no official iPad Facebook app. You can try the iPhone version, but it's a pixelated mess blown up to twice the size, and shrunk down to normal seems to miss the point of an iPad. Well, there's always the full version in mobile Safari, but due to the iPad's file structure, you can't upload that great photo your friend emailed you. The touch version of the site is all right, but it too lacks photo uploading and leaves something to be desired in its UI.
The answer, friends, is third-party apps. There are a variety out there, some only dedicated to uploading pictures or chatting, but there are two stand outs in the App Store that make Facebook on the iPad enjoyable.
A gorgeous app with a nice, clean layout that works in either portrait or landscape mode, Friendly Plus for Facebook is packed with functionality for the price. Across the top of your screen run four main buttons: Home, Profile, Friends, Inbox, that do what you may imagine, as well as a Google button that automatically opens a built-in browswer set to the popular search engine. This in-app browser is a nice option, allowing Friendly to open links without having to fire up the real Safari. It's a small thing, but every bit of speed is appreciated.
For more functionality, at the top left there's a "friendly" button that brings up an additional menu of options. From here, you can upload photos, write notes, edit your profile or your friends list, and even get access to your account and privacy settings. Customizing Friendly lets you choose from 12 color schemes and increase the font size. For the security minded, you can also log out of your account here.
Another nice touch, Friendly allows multiple accounts. As an additional bit of security, users can lock their account with a PIN code so other users can access their accounts without being able to creep on yours. That's a fairly sweet feature, though if you fully log out, that PIN code setting turns itself off.
If you're a Facebook chatter, a dialogue balloon in the lower right hand side switches the screen to a chat page, though this makes it difficult to scroll through your timeline without switching back and forth. That can be annoying when you've got a slow moving conversation in progress, though a color change to this balloon indicates when you've received a response. Topping everything off, at the top of the page is a constant Search bar that seemed a bit laggy to us, the slowest piece of the whole app.
What Friendly is, though, is responsive, swift, and nicely priced. Earlier versions were set at a higher price point ($4.99) than the current rate, though, as we said earlier, there is a free version for users who would rather try before they buy.
An app that superficially resembles Friendly is Facebook Touch HD. That's because both apps add a layer of UI overtopping of Facebook's touch enhanced site. If you compare screen layouts between Friendly, Facebook Touch HD, and Facebook's touch site, the difference isn't all that stark. Both apps prettify up the site and both offer the ability to upload pictures (a feature lacking in Facebook's touch site's touch site and full site when accessed through mobile Safari).
Where this app really comes into its own is in its customizability. Where Friendly gave you some options, Facebook Touch HD gives you the whole store. It launches in a vibrant fiery red that may come as a bit of a shock if you're expecting Facebook's distinctive blue theme. With a tap of the Facebook logo at the top (a not entirely obvious place for a settings button), a screen appears that give us access to a wide array of format functionalities.
Here you can opt for a variety of predefined eleven color themes such as Golden Yellow, Graphite Gray and, yes, Facebook Blue. Users can then tweak these by altering the brightness, the saturation, and the color itself, creating a completely personalized look. There is even the option to select your own font from a list of fourteen and then alter its color as well.
On this settings page resides the Upload Photo button that will pull from your saved photos, as well as buttons that allow you to rate the app, share it with others, and log out. Chat proved difficult to engage and use in Facebook Touch HD and lacked the slider bars that could turn various lists on and off as in Friendly. However, when you're in another app, a notification pops up alerting you to new chat messages. This is incredibly handy if it's a slow conversation and you're multitasking, but can suddenly arrest everything until you hit Close or Reply. The first drops the notification, though another may be quickly coming if your friend suddenly gets chatty, and the second takes you back to the app.
Like Friendly, Facebook HD comes with a built-in version of Safari for viewing links, though this browser lacks the address bar preventing you from fully navigating the web from within the app (admittedly less vital now with multitasking in iOS 4.2, but the option is worthwhile).
Both apps are pretty tight in terms of comparison. Since they both build off an existing touch screen version of the site, there's not much to distinguish between the two. Friendly's built-in browser gives it a productivity edge (especially for business users monitoring their page and sharing related news links) while casual users may find personalizing the experience through Facebook Touch HD more to their liking. Chat was harder to manage in Facebook Touch while Friendly seemed more responsive, though both apps are at the mercy of Facebook itself.
At a lower price point with a more intuitive design and a few more actual functional features as opposed to cosmetics, we give the palm to Friendly for Facebook, though only by a hair.
