Mobile phones are becoming more and more tightly integrated with our online social lives, services such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter can be accessed instantly on our handsets. However the majority of users use an app or their browser to keep updated with these sites.

The next step is full integration with the core functionality of your phone, by this I mean phone calls, contacts, text messaging and even the calendar, camera and music player.

For example, you probably have a large amount of your phone contacts on Facebook, many phones have the capability of adding a photo for your contact that appears when they call but how many people have a picture of all their friends on their phone? If your phone could sync with Facebook you could instantly grab everyone’s photo when they call.

Another example is your friends birthdays listed on Facebook, these could be synced with the calendar on your phone and so on..

Yellix is an app that sits in the background on your phone then whenever you get a phone call it grabs the callers Facebook picture and status update and displays it on the screen. Yellix’s tag line is ‘Know what your friends are up to’, but if they are calling you aren’t you going to know what they are up to without the app? It’s not a ‘must have’ application but it’s still a nice touch.

The BIG problem is that Yellix doesn’t know that ‘John’ in your phonebook is the same ‘John Smith’ on Facebook, how could it? This means you have to manually enter the numbers for all your Facebook contacts online using the Yellix app page,  I couldn’t be bothered to do more than two.

Another problem is that when someone calls it takes about 5-6 seconds for the application to grab the callers Facebook status and picture. I always answer the phone before the status appears on the screen. This is down to the fact that the phone needs to connect to the web and do a look up all in the time it takes for you to answer.

Until mobile phones have a ‘always on’ connection to the internet then apps like this probably won’t be able to provide the best experience.

Download Yellix now for Android, RIM BlackBerry, Symbian or Windows Mobile.

Another company in this space is Dialplus which pulls in information about businesses you are calling, for example if you call a restaurant the app will pull in its address, reviews, opening hours, directions and even menus. These are called Smartresults and will feature information in-call and post-call on the phone display. When friends call it also displays information from all of their social networks.

Dialplus also features advertising based on what information is being displayed on the screen.

The service is currently only available on T-Mobile in the USA.

One company really leading the way with social networking integration with mobiles is INQ and their ‘Social Mobile’ phones. They take it a step further by actually linking Facebook, MSN Messenger and Skype to pratically every part of the phone including contacts, phone calls, chat and messages. An example of this is rather than having to open an application or your mobile browser to check your Facebook messages, they get delivered into a inbox just like your SMS. Last.fm is even built into the media player.

I think this is pretty much what every mobile handset will start to look like in the next 2 years. Full integration with every part of your onine life, your music, friends, photos, status updates and location all synced with your phone.

Apps are great but what we really need is what INQ is moving towards, a seemless, always connected way of getting constantly updated information on the web to our phones. Facebook and Twitter changes every second. I want my phone to get alerts and instantly see updates, messages etc, not open the browser or app, wait for a connection zzzz.

INQ is available on 3 who have always had a pioneering attitude to the mobile web (such as free calls forever on Skype) when most other operators seem to be like rabbits in headlights when it comes to the innovating in this space.

INQ is about to release a full qwerty keyboard style mobile with Twitter capabilities and more. This is really exciting as the phones are priced towards the youth demographic and are affordable so it could put pressure on other manufacturers to produce similar products quickly.