I’m surprised the more folks aren’t writing about the different iPhone apps. Thought maybe I’d put down some notes about the different ones that I’ve used.
I’ve already spoken about my love for the Pandora app. The next one I thought I’d write about was the Facebook app (iTunes Link).
It has 5 major sections: Home, You, Friends, Chat, and Inbox.
The Home Screen doesn’t give me access to my newsfeed but it shows me all the recent status updates of my friends. From here I can quickly update my own status or post a photo.
The You section allows you to see your own profile information, wall, and photos. It’s not that exciting.
For the Friends section, you can quickly page through all of the different friends that you have in Facebook. This is awesome. If more of my friends posted their contact info on Facebook, I could see this becoming kind of an Address book in the cloud. In this section you can also, view your friends photos and write on their walls.
The next section is really cool. In the Chat tab, you can talk with your friends from your iPhone to their Facebook Chat accounts.
Lastly, you can check your Facebook message inbox. Nothing to exciting here.
One thing that is noticeably absent is the ability to accept friend requests. This is something that you can do from the iPhone Web app.
This raises the question. Why does this need to be an iPhone app? Other then having access to the camera, which is kind of compelling but not that big of a deal, why does this need to be an iPhone app.
With the Web app, you can actually see the whole newsfeed and not just status updates. Generally the design seems to be more inlign with what your used to seeing on Facebook.com. With 3G, the Web app is just as responsive as the software application.
So… why get the Facebook iPhone software app?
Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's blog 
I agree — but I think they made this an app for the chat. One thing they left out was the ability to add or browse for friends.. A key function in my opinion.
This is the same as the Facebook Blackberry App. http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2254487659
On my part, I”m in Canada and I have the crappy 400Mb/month Data plan from Rogers, because it’s the cheapest one.
Using the Facebook app (as well as the twitter and WordPress apps, and maybe more…) reduces a lot of my bandwith to use the service. Only texts and images are transfered, no interface images, no CSS, almost no HTML.
so, very usefull if you are on a limited data plan.