SymbianFreeApp #1 - facinate

Today I'm gonna kick off a new series of posts on this blog about Symbian free apps. I'm not going to post every possible free app, but only those I find worthy and use myself.

I'm gonna open the series with a much awaited and surprisingly free, app for Facebook named facinate. Facinate is written in Qt and it behaves more like a WP7 or MeeGo app than a Symbian app. Most things within the app are done by vertical scrolling or side swiping. For example, when you look as someone's profile, swiping left or right takes you to that person's wall or photos.




Facinate is pretty quick, but sometimes the scroll feels choppy(and my best educated guess here is that it is caused by the loading of the images in the feeds), but you have to remember that this app just appeared on the market and it came pretty full featured.

There are some things that I miss with Facinate, like pinch to zoom in the photo viewer, or downloading photos to your phone.

It's only at version 1.0 and the team behind it promise they will have an update soon which will bring the photo downloading feature and many more speed improvements.




The app has basically two views. One is for feeds(and here I include, info pages, wall pages, album pages, friends list, etc) and a second menu view, that takes care of the navigation between the first type of views.

The user interface is in line with the Nokia Belle UX guidelines and it even has a notifications reminder on the bottom right menu button. One thing I did not like about the notifications system, and I hope it will be fixed in the next release is the fact that in order for the notifications to go away, you actually have to click and view each of them.

Facinate also features a homescreen widget which works pretty well, but sometimes stalls and doesn't show anything else for a while. However, I have to say that this is a viable alternative for Nokia Social when it comes to Facebook. Don't get this the wrong way, Social isn't going away, you still need it for SN integration and easy sharing and stuff like that, but for your usual facebook-ing Facinate fills in very well.

Here is a quick UI tour of Facinate



You can download Facinate from Nokia Store.