Sunday, May 10, 2009

Microsoft Releases Facebook Application For Windows Mobile

For those of you that use Windows Mobile 6.0 or higher and have a Facebook account, you'll want to head over to Microsoft's site and download their new Facebook application.

Facebook has a decent mobile page for phones, but it isn't feature rich. It has the basic status updates, wall posts and profiles, but not much more. With the Facebook app, you can do much more. You can do the routine things like check out status updates and accept friend requests, but you can also share photos and update your profile picture with this.

The Facebook app allows you to upload video to your account right from your phone. This is currently the only Facebook app for phones that has this feature.

You should be able to share Facebook info like photos and status updates across all Windows Live services, though I haven't personally tested this feature out. I've not explored the recent explosion of Windows Live services to see how that can tie in to my other online accounts like Facebook. Maybe this is incentive to do so.

A note on the download - it is a .CAB file. There isn't much you can do with a CAB file on your PC. You will need to dock your Windows Mobile device with your PC and transfer the CAB file over to the \My Documents folder. Once it is on the device, simply open up File Explorer and tap the file and the install will start. Alternatively, you can visit the above link directly from your WinMo device using Pocket IE and download and install from there.

The link above also has some screenshots of how the app looks on a Windows Mobile Standard (non-touchscreen) device. It works just as well on a Professional (touchscreen) device. There will be a version tweaked for Windows Mobile 6.5 later this year.

This is the second really nice app from Microsoft for online services, the first being the Mobile Manager for Netflix. I am not sure which group inside of Microsoft is responsible for these apps, but I hope they keep it up. They are top notch.

article taken from informationweek

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