Review: Sobees for Facebook

Posted Wednesday, May 12, 2010 at 12:53 pm by Jason Cartwright |

While we continue to wait for an official Facebook iPad application, a number of developers are taking it upon themselves to create Facebook iPad applications. Sobees is the latest app to do just that, it turns out it’s a pretty nice.

Home screen
After launching the app, you’ll land at the Home screen. This is a dashboard into your contacts latest Facebook updates. The screen is divided into Latest Updates, Breaking News, Latest Images, Links and Video. Using this as an additional monitor while working on your computer works quite well. The app auto-updates periodically letting you keen an eye on Facebook updates while remaining productive.

People
The People screen gives you an easy way to browse through your friends profiles. The page loads in thumbnails of your friends drawn from their current Facebook profile picture. This is a very nice, visual way to browse your friends list, actually this does a better job of presenting friends than Facebook.com.

Photos
To check out your friends photos, just hit the Photos screen. Probably my biggest issue with this app is the fact you can get a single aggregated stream of photos from your friends ordered by date and time. Hopefully this gets added in the future.

Events
The events page shows a present icon on every day that has on or more events on. Your contacts birthdays are added automatically, again this is a feature that’s actually better than the Facebook website. When you select a day with an event on, a description of each event is shown at the bottom of the screen. I do think having the ability to RSVP to events right from the app would be valuable.

Profile
Naturally the Profile screen shows your latest tweets, profile picture and information, as well as a mini-scrollable thumbnail list of your friends.

From any screen of the application you can update your status by clicking on the ‘Update your states’ icon in the top right hand corner.

Overall Sobees for Facebook is a nice application, providing the best interface to Facebook on the iPad other than going to Facebook.com in Safari. The application doesn’t support notifications, but you can like and comment on friends’ updates. That said once the official Facebook app arrives, I’m likely to jump ship for more functionality, at least they have a benchmark now.

More @ Sobees