Los Angeles — This is a day many of you have been waiting for. If you have been feeling neglected of the chatty world of Facebook lately, the latest edition of the social networking site’s app should make you warm and fuzzy. The Facebook app for Android has slowly but surely been improving from its formerly awful state, and today it has finally been gifted with features that users have been expecting for quite some time now, adding a Chat interface as well as push notifications to the app.
Previously, Facebook chat was only accessible through apps like previously mentioned Trillian for Android, but the official solution works quite well. Version 1.5.0 is now in the Android Market and is bundled with many gifts including chat support and push notifications, two huge things that had been missing from the software before today.
The update also adds push notifications for incoming messages and other content. For push notifications, you will be able to choose from a variety of alert options to make certain that you are up to date on all of the action taking place on the Facebook.
Push notifications leave nothing you have ever dreamed of. For each type available (friend request, message and event invites) you have the full potentiality of your Android phone at hand. For example, you can simply choose to have your LED flash, have the phone sent a ringtone and even vibrate or any combination of the three.
The chat interface is remarkably good on first look — It works just as it does on the site. Once it does, however, you can chat to your heart’s content. You can have your usual buddy list, with open chats at the top for quick access. The app will also send push notifications to your phone every time you receive a new chat, so even if you are not in the app at the time you can carry on a conversation.
However, a word of caution, though — if you choose to enable chat on your phone and you have it disabled on the Web interface, you will need to disable it again on the Web.
The update brings the Android version of the Facebook app very close if not on par with the iPhone’s Facebook app which is a huge milestone for an application that at the beginning of 2010 was horrifically bad. The updated Facebook app for Android is already available as a free download from the Android Market < a href=”market://search?q=pname:com.facebook.katana” rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”>here.