Gadgetory

welcome to top shelf I'm David Pierce and on this show we bring you the best in consumer electronics past present and future this week we're talking all about the facebook phone their phones I guess lots of phones after years of rumors Facebook's throwing its hat in the Android ring in a big big way Facebook home is more or less a total takeover of the platform CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it a people first approach there's no chrome no nav just content the lock screen now displays your friends photos and updates messaging is literally everywhere and your friends pop-up is so-called chat heads facebook home is launching this week for a handful of high-end HTC and Samsung devices including the upcoming Galaxy s4 but HTC is also releasing a standalone facebook phone called the first it's available this week for ninety nine dollars from AT&T you spend some quality time with the device and you know what so bad the HTC first is an anomaly really for a whole variety of reasons for one thing it's not gigantic with a 4.3 inch screen and a thin rounded body it's actually usable in one hand and in a market where six inch phones are a thing that's pretty rare it's a nice size and a nice weight though it doesn't really feel like a premium device we've been using the HTC One for a while now and compared to its gorgeous metal body the first Matt polycarbonate back feels like something you might get off a shelf at Toys R Us it's perfectly well made but from the moment you pick it up it's clear why the first is ninety nine dollars and not a high-end device like the one or the iphone five it actually looks like the love child of the iphone 3gs and HTC's last flagship phone the One X it's good not spectacular but for a mid-range phone especially there's a lot to like here the first 4.3 inch 720p display is crisp and bright though it can get pretty hard to see outdoors and it has good colors and great viewing angles and we can't say this enough it's exactly the right size where you do lose something with the first is its camera it's a 5 megapixel sensor and even though megapixels aren't everything the shooter leaves a lot to be desired it takes okay pictures and great lighting but even then has some noise and over processing in low light you might as well not even try we've heard rumors that HCC is working on a phone like the first using the ones ultrapixel camera and we're hoping they're true that's a much better proposition the first general performance isn't perfect either it's definitely a beat slower than some high-end phone so it works fine for most normal tasks battery life is well mid-range below the screen are the first hints that this isn't like any other Android phone there are three menu buttons yeah but they don't look quite like you'd expect there's a left pointing arrow a circle and a horizontal line that's because though this phone does run Android 4.1 point2 if you're counting you'd never know this is a facebook phone with Facebook's new home software layered over top of Google's operating system it takes over the home screen the lockscreen your messaging and constantly reminds you of Facebook's presence in your life the appeal of Facebook home is entirely dependent on how you use Facebook because it completely changes how you use your phone turning an Android device from a curated list of apps widgets and backgrounds into essentially a picture frame showing what your friends are up to if you have pretty friends who take pretty pictures and say witty things all the time you're golden but are you still friends with your ex on facebook or do you have a bunch of friends who think blurry photos are the best photos if so you're in for kind of a weird experience facebook wants to be front and center on your phone but do you want facebook front and center on your phone whether you do or not the first is a great phone it's a good size it has LTE and even though its performance isn't perfect it's solid and for ninety-nine dollars this is a pretty good buy on AT&T facebook home on the other hand is coming April twelfth for a couple of high-end HTC and Samsung phones as well as on the first luckily it's free and it's easy to uninstall if you hate it but frankly we're not convinced that it deserves such a big place on your phone not yet anyway Facebook may have some interesting cards up its sleeves joining me now to talk more about all this is our own ellis hamburger you were in California last week and was late with this thing so what I really want to know is why why now why is Facebook doing this particular thing and why are they doing it right now so this is basically a Facebook's baby for the last year happens to run on this HTC phone but Facebook home is the product of everything Facebook's been working on but was saying the company around mobile everything's mobile first now every team has a mobile component and this represents the best of that because II do you buy that like his Facebook really a mobile first company now because they've gotten crap for that for years for everybody saying you know their mobile products were terrible like do you believe that there really a mobile company now yeah I mean starting last summer when they start rolling out the native iphone app for the first time I think that was a pretty clear indicator that they're focused on delivering the best experience mobile that they can and they need to because for the first time last quarter mobile monthly active users on mobile or higher than on desktop yeah they said what was it twenty three percent of your time on your phone is spent on facebook yep they has insane really this is just a manifestation of that like Google they're all about data so when they see data like that they're like okay let's make Facebook bigger on your phone let's put it right on top of Android so you can't possibly miss it will show it show me a little bit here they did this in two pieces right and so the biggest thing is like these weird pictures of people i barely know that are all over my phone yeah so facebook's biggest product is newsfeed and here it is right on top of your phone you turn it on and newsfeed is right there you can't miss it so you can scroll through your newsfeed items you can double tap to like something like an Instagram you can tap and hold to blow this out and then you also have this call to chat heads which is basically your SMS is and your facebook messages all inside of one screen and this actually stays right where it is unless you move it and even if you're inside of another app so that's kind of making a big statement right there so yeah I mean I guess the idea is base no matter where you go I can't avoid facebook anymore right and so newsfeed messenger their two biggest products right now they're both huge focuses on mobile and well so it's like a focal point since I get that news feed is huge that's like the stick of Facebook it has been forever but his messenger really that important to Facebook they've been you know tweaking it forever but it doesn't seem like it's really huge is this a thing for them now I think at some point maybe when whatsapp hit 150 million users that they realized okay people especially teens are starting to text a ton just on their phones they are sending pictures videos voice memos what have you so instead of like poke they're like oh wait maybe people don't want snapchat they just want like the other stuff that it does and that's right it's personal person messaging and that's an area of Facebook that's always been a little bit lacking and they've really been tuning it up a ton over the last year and if you look at it it's very fast it's multi-platform it's instantaneous and it's synced across everything and in facebook home and a messenger the newest version you just can't miss it so and this will work even on the messenger peace will work even on phones that don't get home this is like the new way you message yeah Chad heads is really big for facebook I mean it's kind of like your friends faces are always there and it's not immediately apparent whether you're texting them or your Facebook messaging them kind of like with I message which is a good play for them because as long as you're getting in touch with your friend that's the goal right right like that that's the dream right is like I need to get in touch with you I don't necessarily care how i do it i just want you to know that i'm trying to get in touch with you right and there's also group messages you can take somebody you can throw them off screen and you can even rearrange these and these are meant to kind of stay with you as your let's say you're looking at a map or something like that you're saying oh hey Ross here's where I am rappe out pop back in it isolates your messages from all the notifications which is great I mean it's brave right it's like all your other notifications are still in the in the Android notification slider but just messages are here and that's kind of them saying this is top priority right well so that's kind of the weird thing for me is that it seems like good Facebook is doing now is almost you know trying to obviate all of these other Google services right so instead of having your SMS messages and gmail and facebook or whatever they're all sort of in Facebook's realm even when it's a text message yeah fair so there it seems like they're trying to like encroach on Google's territory with Android here is that that where this goes next like there's their promise monthly updates they've said that they have a lot more features and they have a lot more things they could do they have the voice calling they have video calling with skype like are they eventually just going to take over my entire phone is that the plan it seems like it I mean based on what they've done so far Google doesn't seem to be a very big barrier if anything they've said Android is making this pretty easy for us it was funny sucks we got up there he was like thanks google for letting us do whatever we want I mean they didn't need to fork Android and slow it down like Amazon did they basically created a launcher and the lock screen combined with your home screen and it's kind of the whole package they spent a long time re architecting all these physics to make them feel a lot smoother they kind of had to dig dig into the Android source code to do that and i think it was it was fruitful and i think it worked and and it's a really smooth experience that like kind of lays the groundwork for what they're going to do next and I mean nobody's emailing any more I want to focus on how people are using Facebook and how people are communicating in general so what do you think is next is it is it going to be voice calling is my phone app going to be replaced by just dial Ellis with Facebook you know I think if that person is online and they have facebook messenger installed in their phone that's going to be the default and I guess why not I feel like that weirds me out but I guess it's really not that big an issue and not only that I mean carriers are so so stubborn about about you letting you call or video chat over cellular data you know they don't want they don't want their minute plans going away ever right but I mean that's what's gonna happen yeah but you're connected to somebody over Wi-Fi it's a lot more efficient and a lot higher quality right so just call them that way that does have an amazed yeah and as of a few as of a few months ago that's what you got I mean it's only in a few countries right now on iOS 9 Android I think it's only in Canada but free calling over Facebook is good is going down yeah and I mean hopefully that's what they do is make that the default on your phone whether you like it or not because it's gonna be a better connection but so you don't think they're gonna take you know the natural extension then is build their own operating system and Tim Carmody wrote this great piece where you compare it to Mozilla and Google back in the day when Google built Google toolbar and Firefox and it had all these cool features and they kept doing more and more and more and eventually were like well screw this let's just build our own browser and now they compute with Mozilla but you don't you don't think Facebook is gonna do that here they don't have a ton of expertise really coding down to the hardware and working with these manufacturers I mean this is software running on an HTC phone but I mean this doesn't this doesn't feel like the kind of situation where they necessarily yet at least have the expertise I mean that's part of the reason i think that they didn't build a phone i mean that would have been monumental enough to work on some hardware of their own but really what's the difference right i mean face this looks like a facebook phone and morning whenever he spoke phones it look like a fit and I mean it's one of the first phones to ship with with Instagram right on it and you know you can imagine that any other phones you're sorry any other apps that Facebook comes out with are going to be stock on here and that's kind of like the one app for one purpose type of mentality and they wanted to just be your facebook toolbox and whatever functions they feel like rolling out they can just add it and that once a month release cycle but then what's weird to me about that is they did make a phone right they was the weirdest thing of her mark zuckerberg comes out as needed no mark zuckerberg comes out and he was like I want to talk about the facebook phone just kidding we didn't make a phone and then he comes back like an hour later is like just kidding we made a phone right like why why on earth would you make this whole play for we want every phone to be a facebook phone and then build a phone I don't think this is how it might be imagined like Google working with Samsung or Google working with LG on the Nexus 4 I don't think it's as closely as that I mean if you look if you look on the back of this phone there is a facebook logo right there yeah but I mean you can go right into your your apps and in home settings you can turn it off just like that you can't do that on other android phones and it's created as an experience that kind of lives on top and I think that that's also the reason so lightweight and maybe that's easier for them to code for as well yeah but it seems to me that do you think people like this phone is ninety nine dollars right so yeah and it's it's small and it's fast and it's pretty light and it seems to be a phone that people are going to get into so is is the idea do you think that they sell a lot of these phones and since most people sort of don't know what they're dealing with anyway they just get used to the idea of having Facebook everywhere and then they use Facebook a lot and then they get another phone and they install facebook on that like is this the maybe the gateway drug to making everybody use facebook phones or like my friend comes over he's like who's debt weird picture of a girl you don't know on your friend and then they go buy or download a facebook app like what's the I still don't totally get the play there well I think that it's an experiment Facebook there anytime you talk to them they talk about their hacker culture over and over and over again they talk about somebody stayed up all night working on this at hackathon or it was on the weekend and they built something or they had an idea and they pitched it to Zach and he said go you know and then they went kazusa and they tried it I mean if you look it just sits on a throne and he's like yes yeah if you look at something like poke there were lessons learned from poke even though nobody's using it literally no one yeah and for facebook it's all about gathering data it's all about experimentation and even though it seems like they've kind of been following the footsteps of some other apps like snapchat they're doing all this work on their own to kind of gather data on what people want so they can make assumptions based on that and build something and like that 23% data point about that's how much people use facebook on their phone that's why they made it right there like that bring that's worthy of an experiment right that brings up a whole host of other issues right because the he said what was it a hundred times a day that you look at your home screen and it's like the the first thing you look at the morning and the last thing at night and it's with you all day and every time you open the phone there it is and so now they you know that this puts Facebook there in all of those places and I get the appeal of that for facebook but that brings up all sorts of possible privacy issues right like this is this is just running all the time and it's presumably take it's getting location data so i can check in it's prompting me to upload photos it's prompting me for my status all the time and a lot of people sort of freaked out about the privacy issues here some people i think got kind of out of control about it like everybody always gets out of control that everything but are there like should i be worried about this is facebook gonna suddenly own my life is this like Mark Zuckerberg spying on me if I'm using my phone I don't think so I mean maybe somewhere down the line but at least for right now the only place you're really seeing ads is your newsfeed and yeah this is with you all the time it's in your pocket it's recording your location and it's kind of hard to tell exactly how Facebook is going to use that information right now but I mean as this always the case with Facebook if you're not buying the product then you are the product and that's kind of what you're signing up for if you get on board you know what it is a great phone and for people who are addicted to Facebook as Mark Zuckerberg said this is the best experience and I mean if you're not using Facebook very much you might want to get this phone because it's a good phone right but Facebook home is not the market you're not part of that market that they're addressing right and if you are part of the market they're addressing you know you're kind of on board with that the whole way you're like you know and I'm sharing everything on facebook i'm messaging all my friends on facebook and I'm okay with that but part of the part of what Facebook always does is say like you know I I'm willing to part with all of my privacy on the stuff that I share right so I have I'm okay with putting up pictures and you can sell ads against all the stuff I put on your site but then the word here is that it's just running all the time like it Facebook is just sort of happening in my pocket all the time and but you don't think there's necessarily anything to worry about there I saw somebody writing about how like Facebook can now track my location all the time and part of me is like well you they could probably do that anyway right but it is so it's just you know same old same old and they'll sell me better ads i guess and never be for like the place across the street instead of some like weird Papa John's in New Jersey that I can't go to anyway yeah I think that's it and you know maybe some point down the line they're going to use that data to create something useful like alerts for when you're near friends or when you're near a restaurant you might like or something like that and you know you might be into that or you might think that sounds horrible but I mean if you're into that you might be one of the kind of people they're trying to sell phone too and you know this is a mid-range bone they devoted a lot of people to working on this but in the grand scheme of things if this experiment fails it's not going to be the end of Facebook fair so are you are you gonna buy this phone I don't think so that's not I mean I really like the design I like Facebook home you might use Facebook right you're like a lot of people think I don't really use face we're gonna want it but you you use it I'm in facebook all the time but I'm so closely tethered to my favorite indie iphone apps and games I just can't possibly get on board with this right now and you know the bummer is that Android is just a lot more of an open system than iOS and this I mean this type of thing is never going to happen yeah on iphone and chat heads chat heads chat heads that stay with me no matter what app I'm in it's not going to happen on iphone yeah and maybe Apple comes up with some unique way to say okay maybe you can elevate some notifications you really like or that matter the most you like VIPs maybe they say we're going to give that a shot but this is never going to work we my family Mars and yeah you know if some of my favorite iOS apps start coming to Android I might be a convert and this is certainly helping this is one of the coolest things Facebook's down in a while and it really kind of illustrates where Android is far far ahead of iOS if somebody codes in a great experience and spends it on a time making it fast and work well you know that's going to be a potential switching point like a for a lot of people getting us out how good they are for google mm-hmm well thank you so much Ellis really appreciate you coming on thank you for having you know go look at weird pictures of all my friends on face oh I will these are the people I haven't seen in a thousand years but anyway so the first is a pretty interesting phone for a bunch of reasons but there's one in particular that Facebook doesn't really talk about and probably doesn't really want you to know and it's that you can actually turn off facebook home and you're left with just a complete pure clean stock Android experience that doesn't come along very often especially on a small phone with LTE and a pretty nice build quality so it's got a bunch of people on our staff really excited including ross miller who may or may not already have pre-ordered the whole selection from AT&T the new facebook home places a heavy emphasis on people first appt second thing is not exactly a people person baby picture baby picture self-portrait engagement photos now the sunset announced sunrise she really hates obama but despite all that i'm still enamored with HTC's first the so-called facebook phone why because with a push of a button i can get rid of facebook home and therein lies the beauty hidden inside the acc first is a trojan unicorn stock android with LTE support like most phones the HTC first comes set up with a skin over android bank samsung's touchwiz or HTC sense unlike those phones facebook home was incredibly easy turn off the back it's the first option in home settings there's no routing or hacking involved I've now got bone stock Android 4.1 jelly bean the HTC first is considered a mid-tier phone at some point all companies made a pact that high-end Android devices needed 5-inch strains but I don't I can use the agency first in one hand and everything is easy to read I'm sure the phone is not as gorgeous as HTC is amazing one but with the mat back it just feels better also it doesn't do this the truly devoted Android lover will probably still want to offer the nexus 4 and there are many good reasons to do so it's got the latest version of Android and it's got a tacit guarantee from google that whatever version entra comes up next it's probably gonna get pretty quickly with the HTC first there is no guarantee they'll be upgraded at all but I can live with 4.1 for a couple of years i've used android in the past and a perfect set being a virgin or two behind besides I know won't stop me for getting the latest apps the other nice thing it supports AT&T LTE network which isn't something any next device does right now that may not matter to everyone but haven't spent months with an iphone 5 I just can't go back to slower speeds yes the camera is so-so and truth be told that'll be the one thing I really missed from my iphone but for Instagram and Twitter it's good enough I don't need the latest and greatest and i don't want all the bells and whistles I don't want a 5 inch device I need to break from my iphone and with the HTC first I can't think of a better option right now and that's our show thanks to ellis hamburger and ross miller for being here for lots more on facebook home and the hcc first including our full reviews be sure and check out the verge calm thank you so much for watching we'll see you next week you