Research in Motion founder Mike Lazaridis is set to join Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz today at the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment show in San Francisco today to unveil a BlackBerry specifically designed for access to Facebook. The application promises the fastest, most streamlined access into Facebook from a mobile platform to date. T-Mobile is the first carrier selected to provide the new software app to its customers.
Looking through the list of supported features, it looks as though you can do just about everything Facebook has to offer, in much than just a glorified WAP implementation. Notifications and messages are integrated with the BlackBerry's push-based architecture. The interface is graphical, with icon representations for the major functions of the system. They've even enabled an offline mode mode for message composition, reading and replying, useful for when you may be out of wireless range.
All this comes with an announcement from Facebook, according to VentureBeat, that they'll be opening up their platform so that "third-party developers can integrate features from web-based applications to work on mobile devices."