Gadgetory

hi this is dieter from the verge and this is Facebook home it's a suite of software that's designed to turn your Android phone into a Facebook phone it's a clever strategy but it'll only work if the software is actually compelling enough for people don't want to install and use on that front home is kind of a mixed bag it basically consists of two parts a custom launcher and lock screen that puts your Facebook feed front and center plus a neat new thing called chat heads that lets you more quickly get into text conversations let's start with a Korra face McComb which is cover feed cover feed takes every update in your newsfeed and makes it a full screen background for your home and lockscreen in fact Facebook has collapsed the lock screen and home screen into a single entity it's a little weird at first but you can't get used to it for every item in your newsfeed you get a big full screen image of either a posted photo or if the update is just text your friends cover image you'll see the name of your friend in the text up top and you can double tap any image to like it or single tap it to get controls for commenting it looks really good and that there's almost no on-screen controls between you and the content each update has a subtle Ken Burns photo pan and they automatically move in the background or you can just swipe between them so what's it like to have your home screen turn into a carousel of your friends updates it's both neat and weird on the neat side I found myself casually flipping through updates way more than I did when they were siloed off and Facebook's app on the weird side well I have a lot of Facebook friends and not all of them post the best stuff cover feed is neat for Facebook junkies but if you're going to switch home screens then you need to be able to get stuff done and quickly hear Facebook home kind of falls down the way it works is you put your thumb and little circle with your own face on it and drag it into one of three directions to the left for messenger up for your app list and right for your most recent app those are pretty limited options and I find a completely strange that Facebook doesn't have a top-level camera shortcut going into apps you've basically got two sides on the far left is a traditional full alphabetical list of all your apps and on the right is a bookmark screen which you can't have our folders or widgets of course though there are buttons for posting your status updates photos or check-ins on Facebook if you have a pin code enabled Facebook home can be a little disorienting by default you can interact with cover feed and even see all of your installed apps without entering your PIN it only shows up once you tap an app of course if you're nervous about this level of access you can switch your pin to be on the top level technically there is a more button that you can use to get your traditional launcher and traditional widgets but overall Facebook huge step backwards Facebook was clearly trying to simplify things but it's simplified way too far and even the most basic smartphone user is likely to feel restricted home also takes your notifications and puts them in little great rectangles that float in the center of your screen you can swipe them away individually or long pressing them to stack them together and dismiss them as a group for most people the only notifications that work this way will be messenger and SMS alerts but on the HTC first everything shows up there all that said in my testing Facebook home has been fast and fluid with only the occasional pause as it brings in new updates facebook says it created a lot of custom code to make things fast and it shows this looks and feels nothing like Android the second big part of Facebook omen is an update to messenger called chat heads it's a stupid name for a really awesome idea Facebook throws the little circular icon on your screen for your active conversations no matter where you are on your phone chat heads work with facebook Messenger and SMS messages but unfortunately with nothing else SMS messages are integrated into facebook Messenger but Facebook keys and separate it out from your traditional messages and that's a little annoying the little chat heads can be repositioned thrown around or thrown away quickly and easily so even if they get in the way you can quickly toss them to another part of the screen tapping out a chat head brings up your conversation with that person on top of whatever you're doing it sounds intrusive and weird but in practice it's stupendously convenient it's more compelling than the launcher part of Facebook home and much more likely to become popular on the HTC first at least chat heads work even if you have facebook home turned off I'm pretty much hooked on chat heads Facebook home has a lot of interesting ideas about how home screen should work and it's undoubtedly fast and beautiful but for now I just can't recommend that anybody install it there's just not enough in the way of managing your apps for most people right now Facebook has promised that it will update home on a monthly basis so maybe it will get better over time still chat heads is really cool and worth a shot since home is free you can download it and give it a try but what I ended up doing was switching to a default launcher while still using chat heads even though I'm not using home I'm pretty sure that Facebook is still immensely pleased to have a presence on my screen even if it doesn't own my entire home screen