I must say, I am quite impressed with the latest iteration of the Facebook app for iPhone. For a long time now, the app has felt sluggish, bloated, and kind of hacked together. No offence to the devs, it would be no easy task to build and maintain it, but sometimes you need a good overhaul to clean everything up, and maybe a new UI to freshen things a little. It seems this is exactly what we get with v4.0.

The interface has been completely overhauled, doing away with the old 'launcher' screen of icons, and moving to a more accesible and (I think) intuitive ''slide-out' sidebar. In doing this they have brought a much more fluid feel to the navigation, rather than having to constantly backtrack to the beginning to go elsewhere. This has also made it possible for them to maintain your location in the news feed as you dart in and out of photos, messages, etc.

Whether it's the more intuitive interface, a bunch of fine tuning, or a combination of, the latest app feels much quicker to respond and load everything. If you used the older apps then I think you will be quite impressed. As with everything new, there are still a few bugs to iron out. The first time I tried to open the app it seemed to hang for a long time. Not sure if it was updating backend settings, etc or just froze. If the earlier, something more informative than a spinning ''busy' icon wouldn't go astray. I've also noticed a few areas (such as in the account settings) where it feels like the transition between pages isn't handled as well as it could be. Of most note here is the ability to generate a long ''backhistory trail of pages by clicking through the different account settings pages, as though we were following a nest of links deeper and deeper (rather than the flat menu they actually are)

Overall impressions? In the words of Facebook themselves.. Like! Well worth the upgrade, and looking forward to what they have in store for us in the updates to come.