When the Nokia C5 was announced, one of the features it claimed to have was full integration between your Contacts and your Facebook friends, going as far as showing you the latest status updates from your friends when you browse through the contacts. This feature seemed to be forgotten as we moved on to more device announcements, especially the Nokia N8, but as the Nokia C5 was finally dropped off for us to review, the first thing we set out to discover is if this Facebook integration claim was right. Right it proved to be, and here is the detailed feature explanation.
How to activate the Facebook social phonebook features
After transferring your Contacts to the C5, you won’t notice any out of the ordinary option related to Facebook. You have to head into your Application folder and look for the Facebook application, open it, sign in and hit Settings. From there you get to pick if you want to activate the Social Phonebook option and how frequently it should look for new status updates from your friends.
The link between your Contacts and your Facebook friends occurs automatically or manually
The automatic method is when Facebook will look in your Contacts to see if you have added their profile’s http address as a link in their contact card and immediately associate them.
The manual option is to hit the Friends section in the Facebook application, search or scroll to your friend, click Options and then Add to Contacts. You can then search for the Contact card you want to associate with the friend and you’re good to go.
You can also do it the other way by browsing the Contact first, hitting Options and then Facebook which will open the Friends pane and let you choose one to associate.
How deep is the integration with Facebook? Status updates, Visual indicators, Profile Picture Sync’ing
When someone in your Contacts is linked with a Facebook friend profile, you will get a scrolling of their latest status as you browse for them in your Contacts without even opening the Facebook application, that way you can easily see what your friends have been up to before calling them. Open the Contact card and click on that status and you’re instantly taken to their profile page.
There are also visual indicators in both the Contacts and the Facebook app that let you see that a contact has a Facebook association going on. Also, one of the neatest features is that the Profile Picture of your Facebook friend will become their Contact picture on your phone. It is a bit low resolution but the feature has the merit of being there.
Other Facebook Features
The Nokia C5 came with the mentioned Facebook application v0.97.9200. It’s different from other Facebook applications we’ve encountered on other Nokia devices like the E71/E72 or the N97, especially thanks to that integration feature, but it’s also visually more refined. There’s a Home view that shows you the latest updates from your friends (status updates, comments, image uploads, tags and such), a Profile view that gives you an access to your own profile and lets you browse your photo albums and upload new photos, a Friends tab with access to your friends’ profiles, and the Inbox with the private messages you’ve sent and received through Facebook.
We definitely see more room for improvement in the Facebook options and a tighter integration between Contacts and Facebook Friends, but this new way of socializing our phonebook is a major step in the right direction. Are you excited by this feature of the Nokia C5? Is this something you want to see spread to a wider selection of Nokia devices? And what other social services do you also want to have integrated with your contacts? Twitter? MSN? Google Contacts maybe?