Facebook releases Facebook for Every Phone app

Mobile devices shape the direction of the internet and a company like Facebook certainly recognizes this shift in device usage from desktop to mobile, which is why the company has launched Facebook for Every Phone app to offer the full mobile Facebook experience for basic phones.

As noted by Opera's monthly State of the Web report, Facebook is among the top five most accessed websites using Opera mini across 14 of its top 20 countries, with the remaining being former Soviet Union countries, China and Vietnam.

According to Facebook's co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, there were 200 million people using Facebook mobile applications back in November last year, so it's certainly a big enough market to pay attention to.

The Java app is designed to offer a rich experience for Facebook users who wish to check their inbox, send messages, watch the news feed, post status updates, upload photos and search for friends from their Java-enabled phones.

To download this app, simply visit http://m.facebook.com from the phone's browser and download the app. The direct link to download from Facebook is http://d.facebook.com/install. Alternatively it is also available from GetJar, Appia, and Mobile Weaver.

The app is free to use for 90 days on mobile operators that have partnered with Facebook, after which, standard data charges will apply. Facebook has partnered with 20 mobile carriers in 14 countries to offer this time-limited free access, and for Indonesia, the carriers are Indosat, Telkomsel, Smartfren, Three and XL.

Facebook claims that the app uses less data compared to the mobile site or other unofficial Facebook Java apps which means it should be more economical to use. Clearly it doesn't work for literally every phone at the moment but 2500 phone models is a good start. The app is available today and compatibility with more phones will be addressed in the future.