Facebook (for Windows Phone) (2013)

Windows Phone 8 comes with built in Facebook integration: Its included People app will show you updates, the Messenger app lets you conduct Facebook chats, and from other apps you can share to the leading social network. But none of this replaces an actual purpose-built interface to Facebook. The Windows Phone Facebook app got off to a shaky start, with users complaining about performance and limited capabilities, but, with this latest version, Microsoft's mobile platform has an improved app that holds its own against its OS and Android counterparts.

Setup

I installed the app on a Nokia Lumia 928 running Windows Phone 8. In addition to the usual permission granting for location, the new Facebook app for Windows Phone has a couple of intriguing new features that you can enable the first time you run the app. The first is the ability to display your Facebook photos on the phone's lock screen. This is actually a pretty cool way to personalize the phone. You can choose which of your albums to derive photos from, and one of two layouts. Both of these also display your most recent Facebook notifications. The feature actually does a nice job of showing your most-liked images, rather than just random ones.

Next, you decide whether you want to enable toast notifications. These are those rectangles that slide down from the top of the screen no matter what you're doing on the phone, telling you that you have a new message, like, or comment, and then slide back out of view. For some reason, I saw neither toast nor live tile updates on my test Lumia 928, though I'd enabled these. I did see both of these notification types functioning on a colleague's HTC 8X, however.

Interface

The interface of the Facebook Windows Phone strongly resembles that of other Facebook mobile apps: The lined button at top left slides out a dark gray left-side panel, which lets you switch among your profile, news feed, messages, places, events, friends, and groups. At the bottom of this list are Apps and Settings. As in the other mobile Facebook apps (and on the website itself), along the top are buttons for Friend requests, Messages, and that Earth-shaped icon for Notifications. Swiping left-to-right moves you through these modes, as well as simply tapping the icons.

You can search from atop the left-side menu, and a top-right button takes you to your recent chats and favorite friends. The new app lets you extend its footprint on your phone: You can make start screen live tiles for subsections such as Messages, Nearby, Events, and Groups.

One interface-related testing note is that the app performed snappily on both phones observed for this review. No longer can the charge of slow performance be leveled at Facebook for Windows Phone the way it was in earlier versions.

News Feed

A gear icon next to the News Feed choice in the left-side control panel lets you decide whether you want to just show top stories or all recent stories. One awesome feature that was missing in the iPhone Facebook app for a long time is the simple ability to delete a post of your own. But the iOS app has surpassed this capability, now letting you adjust the privacy setting for a post—public, friends of friends, friends only, and so on.

The iOS app, but not the Windows Phone app also lets you hide others' as well as your own posts from your timeline. Neither goes the next step, letting you change how many updates you see from a particular user, as you can on the website. One cool interface touch the app does have is "shake to refresh." You can still drag down the screen to refresh or simply tap a refresh icon, too.