It’s been a long time coming, but Facebook has finally released an official iPad app. Users have been able to run the iPhone app on an iPad, but let’s be honest — it looks awful on a 9.7 inch display. The new iPad app has been designed to take advantage of the extra screen real estate and give you access to most of the important features available from the Facebook website.

There’s a new multi-pane view, with a menu bar on the left side that lets you navigate to your news feed, photos, messages, or other areas. There are also two-panel views in several different sections. For instance, the Messages section shows a list of conversations on the left and details of your messages on the right. Notifications show up in a sort of pop-up menu that displays over the top of any screen you’re currently on when you tap the notification icon.

You can also view photos or videos or play games in full screen mode.

The new iPad app isn’t the first tablet-friendly Facebook app. The company released an app for the discontinued HP TouchPad tablet this summer. But there’s still no Facebook app available for Android tablets.

Facebook for iPad is available as a free download from the App Store.

Facebook Messenger is a new mobile communications app for Android and iOS. Facebook launched the app this week as to complement the company’s full-featured social networking apps, offering the ability to send messages to your Facebook friends or SMS messages to anyone in your phone’s contact list.

There are a few Facebook Messenger features that you won’t find in the official Facebook apps for iOS and Android, such as the ability to upload photos. But it looks like that might just be the tip of the iceberg. There’s evidence that a future update will add support for video calling.

Facebook partnered with Skype recently to allow users to make video calls from the Facebook website when using a desktop computer. While that feature isn’t yet available in the company’s mobile apps, the folks at 9to5mac spotted a few video icons in the Facebook Messenger app for iOS. How To Arena went looking for the same icons in the Android app and found them.

It’s not uncommon to find little bits of code or graphics packed into an app for features that aren’t yet available. I suppose it’s also possible that some developer just threw these in to bring out the conspiracy theorists, but I’d be surprised if Facebook wasn’t working on a mobile video chat app.

Facebook is launching a new app for managing your Facebook messages on iOS or Android. It’s called Facebook Messenger, and honestly, it looks virtually identical to the Messages tabs that are already available in Facebook’s existing iOS and Android apps. There are a few differences though.

The new Facebook Messenger app lets you include your location or attach photos to a message. It also lets you send messages to people in your phone’s contact list even if they aren’t already your Facebook friends.

Another key difference is that the new standalone app is a light-weight alternative that only does one thing — messaging. That means you can get to your messages with fewer clicks… if that’s the sort of thing that’s important to you.

Facebook Messenger integrates with the social network’s messaging services, so you can send notes to your contacts and they’ll receive them via email, SMS, instant message, or Facebook notifications depending on their preferences.

While you can run Facebook’s mobile app for the iPhone on the iPad, the company has yet to launch an official iPad app designed to take advantage of the extra screen space on the tablet’s larger display. But it looks like Facebook for the iPad is on the way, because the folks at TechCrunch discovered this morning that there’s already an iPad user interface tucked away in the code for the latest Facebook iOS app.

Facebook pushed out what was billed as a minor update this weekend that changed the restored a “send” button for comments, chat, and messages that had been removed, as well as a few other little changes. But the new app also has everything you need to add a sidebar for searching Facebook or navigating through your news feed, messages, events, friends, places, and other sections on the left side of the screen.

The new app also includes pop-up windows so that you can write a status update or share a link without the message window taking over the whole screen.

TNW has posted step-by-step instructions for enabling the new iPad view. In a nutshell you’re going to need to jailbreak your device, install an app that allows you to modify the UIDeviceFamily setting for the app, and then reboot your device.

If you don’t want to jailbreak your device or find the instructions too complicated, it seems likely that Facebook will offer the app to the public soon, since it already seems to be largely ready to go. But if you’ve already got a jailbroken iPad and you’re tired of using the iPhone version of Facebook on it, there doesn’t seem to be much reason not to update. You’ll probably want to backup your device using iTunes first though, just in case anything goes wrong and you need to restore your apps and other data.

You can find more screenshots at TechCrunch.

Update: It looks like Facebook has disabled access for now. If you’ve already hacked the Facebook app you should be able to continue using it, but new users are finding that they can’t login using the new tablet-friendly view.

Facebook has rolled out an updated version of its Android app. The good news is you can finally now see pages you’ve liked and pages you administrate. Previously if you wanted to view a page you had to find an item from a Facebook page as it appeared in your Facebook feed. Now you can actually see a list — although it’s hidden away in a rather odd place.

Here’s how to find it:

1. Go to your Facebook start screen.
2. Tap on Friends.
3. Select the Pages tab at the bottom of the screen.

No, I don’t know why it’s hidden away in the Friends tab either.

Facebook for Android also now allow s you to tag pages in status updates by using the @ symbol. For instance, @mobiputing. The new app also adds support for liking comments from your mobile device.

Facebook has rolled out an updated Android app with a handful of new features including the ability to upload videos. When you tap the speech bubble icon to start a new status update you can now tap the camera button to the left and choose to upload either a photo or a video to your Facebook account.

The update also adds support for Pages… but it’s limited support at best. You can’t view a list of pages, and if you manage a Facebook page you can’t access any of the settings from the Android app. Instead you can simply tap on the name of a Facebook Page that appears in your news feed to view that page’s wall, info, or photos. I suppose it’s better than nothing, but it’s not very intuitive.

Facebook 1.6 is available as a free download from the Android Market.

Popular social networking service Seesmic allows users to interact with your Twitter and Facebook accounts across a number of platforms. There’s a web app, desktop apps for Windows or Mac, and a line of mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7. There’s also a BlackBerry app, but Seesmic has announced that it will drop support for that platform soon.

While Research in Motion’s BlackBerry platform is certainly struggling to keep up with the rapid growth of iOS and Android, there are still a lot of Blackberry users out there, so Seesmic’s advice that “those effected [sic] by this change” try out Seesmic for other mobile platforms seems a bit… silly. I doubt many people will trade in their BlackBerry for an Android phone just to keep using Seesmic.

That said, it seems clear that plenty of people are trading in their Blackberries for other devices which is probably part of the reason Seesmic has decided to focus on other platforms where the app is more popular.

via Mobilize

Research in Motion has announced that there’s a new beta release of Facebook 2.0 for BlackBerry which adds a few new features including the ability to receive push notifications and other data over WiFi, thus alerting the world to the fact that the previous beta only worked over a cellular connection. Who knew?

Sure, the feature probably should have been included right out of the gate, but better late than never… and we are talking about beta software after all.

Other improvements in Facebook 2.0 beta 3 for BlackBerry include the ability to delete posts and comments using your mobile device, and a prompt that lets you decide whether you want to delete a message from the Facebook web site or you just want to make it disappear from your phone.

Facebook 2.0 for BlackBerry is available as a free download from the BlackBerry Beta Zone, but you’ll need to generate a new keycode if you’re been beta testing an earlier build.