Gadgetory

if you want to seriously amp up your social networking presence on your Android phone then you might want Facebook home for Android I'm Jessica doll court for cnet this is your first look now facebook home is not an operating system it is an app that skins your home screens you can download it through google play for several phones or it might come pre-loaded on your phone as with this HTC first right here facebook calls the photos and status updates that you see march across your screen cover feed and from these screens you can like picture or status and you can comment as well images auto scroll on their own you can advance them manually as well and you can adjust the image quality and refresh rate in the settings there are other ways you can navigate around as well if you tap your own profile picture you can launch the messenger open your app tray or return to the last app that you had open since facebook home does sit on top of android you're able to access every other bit of Android as well for example if you want to open your apps you can either tap the home screen button or you can swipe up from the bottom what you see is an app launcher there are shortcuts to all the apps that you want you can drag and drop apps on or off if you want to remove them you can have as many app launcher pages as you want to see a full list of apps you swipe over to the left and you've got a vertical list right there from the launcher you can update your facebook status check into a location and upload photos through a specific Facebook uploader tool chat heads is the same as your facebook Messenger but you can chat through Facebook or through SMS with your contacts circular icons of your friends profile pictures pop up when they chat with you and from there you'll be able to drag them all over the screen and interact with them to close it you simply swipe the chat head away if you have multiple chat heads open you can stack them up to conserve space and expand them out and you can close them one at a time or as a stack facebook home takes over your lock screen by default so that when you wake up the phone home is the first thing you see however you can change this in the settings and you can have your regular lock screen as well facebook home is also really easy to turn off and turn back on again if you change your mind and you want us found it for a little bit although there are no ads on Facebook home right now CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that is the plan for the future to start monetizing the feature I personally wouldn't use Facebook home on my regular Android phone but there are some things that I like about it I really like chat heads for example and I wish that Android which is take that implementation and that we can see it on all phones it's really useful handy and clever I also think would be really nice to be able to update your status and take photos directly from cover feed on facebook code so that's something I hope they'll implement in the future facebook home is obviously for people who love facebook you want to interact with their friends the second they turn on their phone it's free to download and use however so if you think you might like it you won't lose anything by trying it out I'm Jessica doll court for CNN this has been your first look at facebook home and you can read my full review at CNN com