Along with the announcement of Xperia Mini, Xperia Mini Pro and Xperia Acro, Sony Ericsson also brings new deep integration of Facebook into their system called “Facebook Inside Xperia”. This new feature will debut on the new Xperia mini products and will become standard features for upcoming software update to the Xperia arc, Xperia PLAY and other handsets in the Xperia family. So, what’s the “Facebook Inside Xperia” is all about?

It’s basically a new way of using Facebook features on your Xperia phone which now directly integrated as the Xperia features. The Sony Ericsson blog noted some main features of the “Facebook Inside Xperia”. Check out also the Facebook Inside Xperia home page.

Single sign on to Facebook – when you start your phone for the first time, you will be prompted an option to log in to Facebook and create permanent connection to it. From there you don’t need to login to Facebook or other similar apps to use Facebook. The good thing is, you can also choose whether to set this option automatically or turn specific parts off.

Contact sync with Facebook – besides the contact sync between your local contacts with Facebook contacts just like on current Facebook app, this new integration added more Facebook info on your phone contact. In this way, you can see your friend’s status, photos or likes just by looking up from your phone book.

Facebook photos in your phone Gallery - in addition to the local pictures and other pictures gallery like Picasa pictures, now you will have your Facebook photos and Facebook photos you’re tagged in directly on your phone gallery.

Like-button on Music player – now you can have new experience in enjoying music on your phone. With the new like-button on the music player you can share the music you are listening to your Facebook friends by clicking the “like” on the song. From there your friends can learn more about those songs and also listen to it for some songs or even buy it. This works through the Sony Ericsson Track-ID service.

Media discovery widget – there will a dedicated widget included to show you the videos and music that your friends shared on their Facebook wall including YouTube, Spotify etc which you can view easily too.

Well, it’s no doubt that Facebook is a must have features or app for mobile phone nowadays. A report even said that up to 50% of consumers app time is used in the Facebook app. So, no wonder from now on will see this kind of integration on more new smartphones.

The only number we’ve heard so far is the 40,000 units sold on the first day of the launch of the Windows Phone 7 in US on November 8th. Now after couple of weeks in the market we haven’t heard any updates about this number yet.

So let’s try to figure it out using the AllFacebook statistics. Of course it’s still not 100% accurate since we’re not sure whether all Windows Phone 7 users use Facebook although i’m sure most of them do.

There are two apps statistics we can use as reference. The first one is “Windows Phone” which i assumed to be the number of users using the Facebook integration in Windows Phone 7. This statististics shows 126,018 montly active users as per November 30th.

The second app is the dedicated “Facebook app for Windows Phone” which is now the second most popular free app in the MarketPlace. This app usage has been increasing significantly albeit it’s released more than a week after the Windows Phone 7 device it self. And as per today, there are 92,859 monthly active users at the moment.

So what do you think. Are those statistics can represent the number of the Windows Phone 7 device sales so far? Well, apart from the accuracy of this statistic, it’s interesting to see what Microsoft will do to achieve their 30 million target for 2011.

See some screenshoots of the Facebook Places in BlackBerry app below.

In addition to the Facebook Places, this new version also added some changes below:

• Messages list – enable you to view your Facebook messages list
• Searching – enable you to search people and pages through Facebook
• Friends and Pages screen – the redesign of the friend list which enables you to view your Pages list from the Friends screen.

The Facebook for BlackBerry v1.9 offers the following new features:

• Dedicated Inbox – Now you can view Facebook messages in one separate inbox or within your BlackBerry messages inbox. The app will pre-fetch 30 of your existing messages and will continue to sync message on your BlackBerry with your Facebook inbox.
• Facebook Search – with this feature you can search for individuals and pages to make it easy to find mutual friends, add friends and “like” pages. Besides, for BlackBerry 6 users, Universal Search will also pull Facebook results.
• Enhance Friends List and Page List – View Friends profile photos and pages in list form
• Redesign Navigation Bar – You may view your own profile and click on the Search and Message icons with the new navigation bar.

To try this new version, you have to be registered as a BlackBerry Beta Zone member. There are limited number of slots for the Beta so get it now.

Check more details and photos on BlackBerry Blog!

Below is the screenshots of Facebook Application for Windows Phone. You may download the Zune software and check it your self for more details.

From Marketplace,

Facebok for Windows Phone makes it easy to stay connected and share information with friends. You can post status updates, check your news feed, review your upcoming events, manage your inbox, upload photos, publish notes, accept friends requests, and look at your friends’ photos, walls, and info.

This app makes use of your phone’s:

• data connection
• sensors
• web browser
• phone calls
• phone identity

Even it’s not specifically mentioned, but this update v3.2.2 supposed to fix the issues for jailbroken iPhones users. On Saturday, on it’s Facebook page the Facebook for iPhone team wrote a message below,

If you have a jailbroken device, you may have experienced problems with our latest updates. We’ve identified the issue and have an update with a fix coming soon. Thank you for your patience.

I personally didn’t aware there’s an issue with my jailbroken iPhone.  But that’s good to see that the team is really care about any issues on their app and released the fix so fast.

The email sent to the Foursquare CEO said, ““So is Facebook the location platform now? And is Foursquare an app on that platform?”. And here is the response:

No, we’re still a platform for location, specifically around sharing locations though check-ins, surfacing interesting things around you and using game mechanics to encourage and reward for certain actions and/or behaviors.

Facebook also launched a location platform, which appears to be mostly based on checkins (and common FB elements like comments/likes/photos).

We already allow users to publish their 4SQ checkins into the Facebook News Feed and we’ll eventually going to allow users to push them into the Facebook Checkin Feed.   I’d imagine we’ll prob pull FB checkins into 4SQ too.   We’re in the middle of a redesign and some new feature launches, so we’re going to get thru those before getting started on FB integration.

If the Facebook Integration is really happened to Foursquare, then it’s really interesting to see how the two networks work together while at the same time competing each other.

[via: BGR]

New features and enhancements on this version include:

• Notifications - If you have BlackBerry® Device Software version 4.6 or later, You can now receive Facebook® notifications without associating an email address with your BlackBerry® device.
• Notification email messages – You can now stop receiving Facebook email notifications that are sent to the email address that you specified in your Facebook account.
• Friend list performance enhancements – The friend list should now load faster.
• Photo performance enhancements – Photos and photo albums should now load faster, and photo thumbnails are now larger.

More details check the Release Notes of the Facebook for BlackBerry Smartphones v1.8!

New Features:

• Places. Use Places to see where your friends are and share where you are
• You can set the privacy of individual status updates
• See all recipients of inbox messages
• (iOS4) Upload photos and videos in the background

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a delay when commenting on a post or posting a status update
• Fixed some Notes display bugs
• Fixed some reliability bugs in News Feed

From what i read based on people’s comments in Facebook about this feature, many of them are not so interested on this feature for security reasons. But on the other side, there are also many people are so excited to wait for this feature to be available for their devices and locations. So, what about you?

Well, these features is actually not a new thing. Foursquare is one of the company that has been using it before in it’s services. And there’s even the Foursquare app for iPhone. So Facebook is kind of competing Foursquare now. Facebook probably seen this as an interesting features and opportunities. And with the existence of the Foursquare and looking at the number of Facebook users, it’s relatively easy for Facebook to adopt this feature to it’s network.

Besides the “check-in” features which enable you to share your location to your friends, the Facebook Places also offers options to discover your friends who are also at the same place by tagging them. Those people you can find on the “People Here Now” section.

What about Privacy?

We know that many people and media have been talking about privacy controls issues in Facebook recently. So in this new feature, Facebook also include the privacy controls. For those of you who don’t want to be tagged or don’t want to be appear in the list of “People Here Now” section, you can set it through your privacy control.

There should be an update to the Facebook for iPhone and i’ve been waiting for that. But i haven’t seen it so far. Mine is Facebook 3.1.4 so it should be 3.1.5 or something like that. I tried to access it through touch.facebook.com and i couldn’t find the “Places” options. But yeah, i’m not in US though.

So for those of you in US, you may try it and tell me your impressions and opinions!

[via: FacebookBlog]