Yesterday, the much-anticipated Facebook app for iPad was released. Facebook had been teasing us for a few months with talk of its upcoming release specifically for the iPad.

I think the biggest difference between the iPhone app and the iPad app was that the iPhone app simply wasn’t optimized for the iPad. You had to hit the “2X” button to stretch the app across the screen of the iPad and the resolution wasn’t that great.

Now downloaded on my iPad, I’ve had a few opportunities to play around with the new app. As stated above, the biggest difference in my opinion is the newly optimized view to the iPad viewers. Something about the new interface had a “cleaner” and more stream-lined approach. It resembled Twitter a bit.

The apps, lists, pages, etc., are located on the left hand side of the screen, just like on the desktop version. This makes finding those items easier to locate. Impossible not to locate, really. Two bigger perks of the new app include the gaming capability in full-screen as well as the ability to chat.

Certain commands are easier to perform now, whether it’s the swipe of a finger (to advance in a photo album), or a pinch (to close said pictures and other apps quickly, or to simply zoom in or out) and switching screens is less common. Gone are the times when your place is lost on the page because you opened a new page. Now they simply stay in the background while the new page opens on top.

In fact, looking through photographs is supposed to resemble perusing a photo album and then some. To flip through pictures, a simple swipe of the finger across the page will do. Forward or backward. You can even zoom in pictures to get more of an “up close and personal” view, which is not always a good thing! Now the time for people to really use discretion when uploading pictures of a fun night out!

While there are questions about why it took so long, according to Facebook, the answer is simple. “It just wasn’t ready yet” according to Bret Taylor, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer. However, now that it’s out and public, it’s receiving little fanfare. Why is that? Perhaps because the world had heard it was coming for months. Perhaps because there was the new version that was leaked back in July and some people got a taste of it. I think the less-than-stellar fanfare is due to the fact that it’s pretty much the same app… just on a bigger screen.