Everybody that has a web-enabled phone and a thing for online interaction in lieu of actually having in addition to a social life knows that the biggest social networking sites are but a few keystrokes away at all times via mobile websites. Of course, even mobile-optimized web applications can be sluggish or glitchy sometimes, since they could potentially be affected by dozens of things like browser incompatibilities or updates. Luckily, smartphone users have an alternative: native application for their phones that talk directly with the service without a web browser getting in the way.

Facebook seems to be one of the more popular mobile websites, which makes it a relatively good candidate for a smartphone application written. Palm seems to agree with this, since the company released Facebook for Palm for their smartphones last month.

Facebook for Palm sports a relatively intuitive user interface, with its five-tabbed home screen; it seems matches the new phone interface included with the Treo 680 phones. The five tabs let you navigate to the Photos, Status Updates, Contacts/Friends, and Mail pages along with your Home page news feed quickly. Of course, the feature that sets Facebook for Palm apart from the regular mobile version of Facebook is the ability to quickly and easily upload pictures and videos to your Facebook profile. You can also easily search through your Facebook contacts and dial or text message someone who might not be in your phone's contact list already.

Facebook for Palm is supported on the Centro, Treo 755p, and Treo 680. However, rumor has it it'll work on your 700p as well, if you select the 755p version for download.

So you've got a snazzy Treo 680, but every time you whip it out to make a call or snap a photo, you realize that the battery's dead.

Turns out there was a bug that allowed the camera to draw power from the battery even when the unit was in standby. Palm's issued a software patch for the problem. The fix is recommended for all Treo 680 users, but will not work with any other Treo models.

You have to download the update to your computer, and you can either install it using Palm HotSync, or by copying the file to a memory card and installing it directly on your device.

Despite ads floating around inviting shoppers to the url, www.ontreo.com--Palm's site for the new Treo 680 released last week--had remained dormant until today. And it probably should have stayed that way. Engadget says the phone itself has a "whiff of 2004" about it, and that goes triple for the obnoxious flash-based bit of yesteryear that Palm has whipped up to support the phone. Aside from being blinding and difficult to navigate, it's one of those "hey, look at our cool site!" sites that tells you absolutely nothing about the product. Assuming you can find the information links (I'm not telling; you'll have to figure it out for yourselves), each of the phone's features is given exactly one paragraph of description before the detail links whisk you off, without so much as a how-do-you-do, to Palm's main site. Actually I'm okay with that. It's where they should have sent everyone in the first place.

There is one interesting tidbit buried in the site, though: apparently the the 680, like it's big brother the 700, will support TiVoToGo. That makes it almost worth the $199 pricetag right there.

You can read a paragraph about that, too, if you make it through the blinding orange and emoticon-headed masses with eyesight and sanity intact.