Back in October I wrote about the upcoming release of the Facebook phone by 3 Mobiles, a mobile provider in the U.K. Today, the company announced it and it’s pretty much as expected. The phone integrates your Facebook contacts directly with your phone contacts, placing their status updates right under their name in your personal phone book.

There is also a Facebook application which functions similarly to most other mobile Facebook mobile applications. The company website suggests that notifications are also sent directly to your phone with alerts. I’m not quite sure that I’d want to receive all my Facebook notifications right on my phone outside of having the option to load the application.

Could you imagine getting an alert every time one of your friends changed their relationship status, tagged you in a photo, or installed a new application? Then again, perhaps that is the new world that we live in. A world in which all of our friends’ personal activities are just a click away. I’m assuming you can turn off notifications though which would make this phone bearable.

Calling this phone the “Facebook phone” is somewhat misleading though considering the level of integration. The contact list is not completely based on your Facebook contacts but this is definitely a step in the right direction of a theoretical “Facebook phone”. Unfortunately I’m not in the U.K. so I won’t be able to test it out. Let us know if you are able to get your hands on one of the phones and send us photos!

Update
Just to clarify, the phone is called the “INQ1″ but appears to be marketed as the first Facebook phone. According to Facebook, “The INQ1 includes a pre-loaded Facebook application deeply integrated with the phone. We are currently working with a variety of partners to deploy deep and rich Facebook user experiences on as many mobile devices as possible.”