Rumors of the Facebook Phone were not totally smashed when Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new app Facebook Home for Android at the Menlo Park office. The concept of the Facebook phone is not entirely dead however. Once you download and install the app on one of the approved phones, you’ll get an experience that takes over your phone.
There is a short list of phones mentioned on the Facebook Page which includes the HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy SIII, and the Samsung Galaxy Note II. Per the wording on the Facebook page, there may be other phones. One phone that is definitely coming out soon which you can even pre-order is the new HTC First which will have the app pre-installed and will be available with AT&T. The main goal of the app is to be front and center on your Android device. If you want to do anything on the device, it will be secondary to the Facebook Home app.
When your phone is idle, you will be inundated with pictures of what people in your friends list are posting via Cover Feed. It slowly scrolls images by with the associated post typed over the image. If one catches your attention, you can place your finger onto the screen and hold it to expand your view of the image. If there are not images associated with a post, it will display their cover photo. This can become redundant on your screen because people have not transitioned to posting a pic with each of their posts. That is the direction that Facebook would like users to go.
While the app works well for its intended purpose, it makes utilizing your phone for its intended purpose more difficult and cumbersome. The only time I can see myself utilizing Facebook Home is when I am sitting somewhere with nothing to do or doing something where I will want to make lots of updates to Facebook. Both of these scenarios are few and far between so I will probably not use it as much as Facebook would like, since I am not like my teenager and do not live on the site. For his generation, however this is the perfect interface.
Source: Skynet Solutions
By: Joe Hart