Facebook 1.6 for BlackBerry is finally out! It took years for RIM to release Facebok 1.5 from the older 1.2(?) version, but they have quickly followed up on 1.5 to release 1.6, which adds a number of interesting features to the major 1.5 featureset.

For quite a while, the gold standard for Facebook mobile applications has been on the iPhone. The iPhone Facebook app had pretty much all features a mobile user would need to stay in touch with friends. Facebook 1.6 on the BlackBerry has closed the gap in functionality between the two devices. The major change I noticed were as follows:

1. More space on the screen – 1.6 now sports a much slimmer top bar and smaller menu icons. Some of the text and pictures also came up smaller on my Bold, and all of these were noticeably of higher resolution, thereby contributing to more usable screen real estate, which is always good on these type of devices.
2. Opening the app now defaults to the Status Updates screen – As you probably remember, the pre-1.5 default screen was the Notifications screen. To check what people are doing, you would have to manually go to the Status screen which typically takes anywhere from 5 to 7 seconds to update. On 1.6, the default screen you see after opening the app is the Status screen, and updates are noticeably faster as well.
3. Smoother scrolling – Probably not a critical functionality enhancement, but navigating and scrolling around the app is much smoother now. The screen scrolling action is extremely smooth with just the right amount of inertia built into the movement, very similar to an iPhone-type scrolling interface (but still using the trackball).
4. Finally a profile new without going to the browser – When you click on the picture of a friend, your friend’s Profile will now show, unlike the previous version where you would need to switch to the browser to view a profile. Furthermore, number of buttons were added in the Profile page — Poke, Message, View Photo Albums, View Photos, and Request Number. If your friend already published their number, then the Request Number button switches to a “Call” button. The info isnt complete in this view, though, so there is still a menu item to view the mobile site of your friend’s profile, but this is a big improvement from the previous version.
5. Album viewing has a smooth “Cover flow” interface – This is pretty big, viewing and selecting albums now has a great Coverflow-like interface, which makes selecting an album really fun and easy.
6. Viewing pictures has an iPhoto feel – While selecting albums is cool, viewing the photos is much cooler. Instead of getting the usual view of thumbnails to select from, opening an album immediately shows the first photo in the album and shows a translucent, animated top and bottom bar. The top bar shows the photo comment as well as the album while the bottom bar shows a smooth scrolling set of thumbnails for the other photos in the album, which you would scroll to to view. I have to say that the way they did this was really nice.

Otherwise, the rest of the app looks pretty much the same. The major change, which is the Profile view and items under these like albums, are integrated with the entire app.

I still have a few gripes about the new version. I still havent found a way to search for and add a new friend from the app. The old “Add a friend” button is still there, but you would need to know the friend’s email address. The iPhone implementation of the “Add a friend” function is still the best where the user would just go to the Facebook friend list and type a name. If the name typed isnt a friend, the app would automatically search for other Facebook users and, upon selection, a friend request could be sent. Also, the iPhone version has an integrated IM client to their Facebook app. This would be nice. Perhaps, though, in BlackBerry terms, the chat functionality would actually become a separate dedicated chat app instead of being built into the Facebook app.

So thats it. Is it worth the upgrade? Definitely. Just the refreshed, cleaner user interface is reason enough to upgrade. I think 1.6 is miles ahead of the older versions, and of course, best of all its free.

Check it out and download the new version by pointing your BlackBerry browser to http://mobile.blackberry.com.