Review: Facebook on webOS for HP TouchPad

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

One of the launch apps on HP's new TouchPad tablet is a full-scale Facebook application. To date,  the BlackBerry PlayBook and the TouchPad  have device-specific version of the popular (750 million users) social network. Here's a quick review.

Facebook is a web application, probably the most multifunctional (now with chat and Skype built in) web application we use. So getting the experience ported over to HP's webOS tablet did not require a whole lot of reprogramming. webOS uses HTML as part of its code base so websites and web applications are a natural choice for webOS app ports.

We're happy to say that with Facebook, any user of the website will be familiar of the interface as well as some of the functionality. The News Feed is front and centre and a feature unique to the TouchPad is that you can look at them in linear fashion (like they are on the web) or in a digital magazine format similar to the iPad's Flipboard (see below)

Since the TouchPad is basically reformatting content off the web, then it can pretty much provide a flexible layout for the news feed.

We find that on a tablet like the TouchPad reading snippets in this layout is more desirable than the boring old timeline view on the web.

Another cool feature we discovered is the integration of notifications on the Facebook app which appear on the top  of the screen and then subtly dissapear (they can be accessed easily).

For users with friends who use Google's mobile check-in feature, the app brings up a map with a Google Latitude-like placement of icons to see where people are in relation to the map.

Performance of the Facebook app varied. There were times when the TouchPad seemed to be choking slightly in rendering the information.

We also noticed that with the TouchPad, once you change orientationsm the screen will flip quickly but the text and visual information is initially blurred and then refreshes. This probably happens with all tablets but is particularly visible on the TouchPad, which while not big deal, might put off some users.

 The HP TouchPad Facebook app 'gets'  what the tablet form factor offers and while clearly a beta version of the app, this is at least on free, popular and useful applcation that TouchPad users will be able to enjoy right from the start. It is also refreshing to see a launch app that is actually an application and not a link to a website (the YouTube app on the TouchPad is such a switcheroo, I feel embarassed for YouTube for not providing a proper app on launch on the TouchPad).

The Facebook app bodes well for other popular websites such as Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr and basically any website whose HTML code can be rehashed into webOS.

A lot of the early issues we've seen with the TouchPad seem to be software related. Things like stalling, freezing, timing out when trying to access services and the odd tilting from landscape to portrait mode when it isn't necessary should all be fixable by an OTA update which HP webOS honcho John Rubenstein confirmed is coming soon.

The Facebook application for the HP TouchPad is probably the best non-web implementation of the service we have tried. It is still rough around the edges but very promising and can only get better.

Rating: 4 out of 5