Someone at Microsoft must have grown tired of being snubbed by the social networking platform after investing so heavily in the site and decided to write their own application. The only downside is that the new Facebook application looks much more like a Windows Mobile application than anything Facebook has created.

To be fair, Microsoft’s take on Facebook for mobile devices is a full-featured mobile application. It allows you to see your activity feed, update your status and even allows you to dial up your Facebook friends from a built-in phonebook.

Microsoft even went so far as to enable video uploads from mobile devices straight to the user’s Facebook account. This functionality has yet to be included in any other mobile Facebook client to date. In fact, the one feature missing from this application is Facebook Chat.

The Facebook for Windows Mobile application has five tabs that allow you to see you activity feed, profile, friends, message and phonebook. The icons for these sections are at the top, which gives it a slightly different feel than the native Facebook mobile applications.

This is likely due to the standard Windows Mobile navigation setup of having two buttons on the bottom for the main menus. While this is perfectly reasonable design, it’s not consistent with the look and feel of Facebook’s intended design.

Other aspects of the Facebook for Windows Mobile application that make it feel awkward are the colors and font. While the colors of the icons are relatively correct, users would have to change the color of their Windows Mobile theme to match the color for it not to feel awkward and mismatched.

The standard fonts that come with Windows Mobile are Tahoma and Courier. Facebook’s style relies heavily on Lucida Grande, a font that users would again have to change on their mobile phone in order to get a consistent look and feel.

While these tweaks are completely unnecessary to use all the features of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile application, it just looks awkward in its current styling. This inability for Facebook to create an application with a style consistent with its design could be the reason that the company hasn’t invested the time to develop an application for Windows Mobile.

You can download the application (pictured below) directly from Microsoft:

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Entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 10:11 am under Cell phones, Microsoft, Online video, Social Media.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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