14 DAY TRIAL // After many months in limbo, Facebook has finally unveiled its iPad app. Judging by the popularity of third-party Facebook apps for the iPad, a lot of people have been waiting for a long time, a year and a half, for the social network to debut a native app.
You'd think that Facebook, a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank and thousands of some of the brightest software engineers around would be able to come up with something to give to its users in this time.
Especially considering that the third-party apps were created by a few developers at small companies.
But it wasn't that Facebook couldn't have released an iPad app, it was ready many months ago according to the man that built it, who no longer works for Facebook, it's that it didn't want to.
More specifically, it didn't want to release it when it could hold it hostage to have some leverage against Apple, with which it was engaged in a bitter app 'turf' war.
A war that Facebook lost in the end. So now, months after it could have been available, the iPad app is finally here.
Granted, the app is pretty slick. It leverages Facebook's greatest strengths and caters to the specific needs of the tablet user. For example, the photos section has gotten a lot of attention.
Photo albums are staked up neatly and moving through the photos in an album is a pretty seamless experience.
The larger screen real estate has enabled Facebook to also pack more functionality into the app at once. For example, by default, you'll see your News Feed but also a list of friends online now that you can chat with.
Access to the three main Facebook nav buttons, Friends, Messages and Notifications, is also easy and almost identical to the site.
The big new feature is support for applications, accessible via a Bookmarks left-panel, which is hidden by default. Having access to both native and mobile web apps from Facebook is great, but this is why everyone waited this long to get the app.
Overall, the app seems solid and should shoot to the top of the app popularity charts for the iPad. Too bad it took so long to get here.