GoMo grapples with social networking apps

Rating: Not much luck with Ovi/Facebook and Zbang

GoMo News isn’t having much luck this week with social networking apps for mobile phones. For starters, Zbang‘s claims to have a mobile element turned out to be exaggerated. Then Facebook for Nokia wouldn’t work.

Having seen a teaser on Facebook for apps aimed at the mobile phone owning fraternity, GoMo News decided to investigate.

According to Facebook the app, Facebook Mobile, is freely available for a very impressive range of handsets indeed.

The list includes: Nokia; Android; Windows Mobile; Sidekick; Palm; Sony Ericsson; INQ; Blackberry; and, naturally, iPhone.

This seemed an ideal opportunity to revisit a leading app store – namely, Ovi. This is where the fun and games started because GoMo had forgotten to verify its ‘Nokia account’.

So we verified by SMS and email and logged into our Nokia account. Next we logged into Ovi itself and amazingly, it appears you need to log in again for the actual Ovi store itself.

Searching for Facebook brings up three choices. The first option is for Nokia S60 handsets; the second option is for the E71/E72 modles and the third option is for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.

Ah. But GoMo News hadn’t read the smallprint properly. That’s not really all Nokia Series 60 handsets. It’s only Series 60 Touch phones.

So GoMo wasted a good hour trying to figure out why Ovi correctly identified each of the three Nokia Series 60 handsets we tried but insisted they weren’t compatible with the Facebook for Nokia app we were trying to download it to.

Suitably enraged, GoMo fired off an angry missive to Ovi accusing the company – falsely – of operating a bugged software vetting service.
It was only while looking at the alternative – because two of them are marked Facebook for Nokia – that that all important word ‘Touch‘ was noticed.

So now GoMo is going to investigate the INQ Mobile version.

So next comes Zbang. Now this seems a very nice piece of software aimed at putting all of your social stuff in one place. The list includes Picasa; Flickr; Facebook; Twitter; Songza and YouTube.

Great. The Press blurb said that Zbang is “an integrated online communication platform for Internet and mobile users.” Plus there’s a mention of that iconic handset again …

“Our documents, files, pictures and contacts are scattered all around: Outlook, Picasa, Flickr, YouTube, Gmail, Hotmail and different devices like iPhone.”

At present, however, Zbang is very definitely PC only – although we would recommend it. GoMo News contacted the company

Dr Eidan Apelbaum told GoMo News, “I wanted to clarify that we are developing a mobile app (as the article implies) however we have currently released our desktop application. Sorry for the confusion and I will send you an invite as soon as we get our mobile app up and running.”

And GoMo News will let you know when we tried it!

Tony is based in Surrey and is a veteran comms journalist. Tony also writes on the UK market… contact him here tony@mobileinsight.co.uk