Access Facebook

The official Facebook app allows you to access your Facebook account quickly and easily from your Apple iPhone or iPad.

The app provides a simple way to add status updates, upload photos, send messages, chat with Facebook Chat, check into places, and much more.

The hub of the Facebook app is the news feed, which offers a timeline of recent posts from Friends, with shortcut buttons to post an update, put up a picture, or check in based on your current location. There are also shortcut buttons for friend requests, messages, and notifications.

To access even more Facebook features you can open up a bookmarks sidebar and quickly view and select things like your friends list, groups, events, apps, and games. Although apps and games are selectable here, they can’t be run from within the Facebook and you’ll need to download then run a separate app or game on your iOS device.

Facebook for iOS also makes it easy to quickly upload photos taken on your iPhone or iPad 2 camera to your Facebook account. Browsing photo galleries using the application is also very easy, and you can simply swipe through albums with your finger.

Photo galleries look particularly neat on the iPad, where the large screen format is used to give real focus to images. However when uploading photos, there are no basic image editing options when you upload photos, such as crop, rotate or resize.

Unfortunately, there are some things about the Facebook app that still need improvement. For instance, the chat option is very clunky and confusing. You can open a chat window and text people, but then these also show up in your message inbox, which gets quite annoying.

Chatting on the iPad-optimized version is much more comfortable than on the iPhone, because chats appear in a sidebar on the left of the screen, allowing you to continue viewing the rest of Facebook at the same time.

Overall, the Facebook app is a more enjoyable experience than using the Facebook web page on your iPhone or iPad.