Facebook Home, the social network’s new user interface for Android, won’t be available for download until April 12th. Even when it hits the Google Play Store, Home will only run on 7 phones, one of which is the newly-released HTC First that has it preloaded. Fortunately, you can get a more immersive Facebook experience on your Android phone today with these apps. More »
Some of the discussion about Facebook Home since its debut yesterday has related to concerns that it gives the social network too much access to user’s information, and now Facebook has responded. Its blog post specifies that Home is subject to the same controls as everything else in a user’s Facebook account. It states that Facebook will not track user’s location any differently than the existing app, and while it could see what apps are launched, it can’t observe what actions are taken within them beyond the already existing Facebook API hooks. As far as information that is collected, it will have a list of apps that are in the Home launcher, and tracks data including which apps are responsible for notification, which is kept identifiable for up to 90 days.
Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile, Google, Facebook
Source: Facebook Blog
This week on the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast we talk about bold moves by Verizon and T-Mobile and the Facebook Fone and Facebook Home.
This week we welcome Darrell “Patents” Etherington to our soundstage and I’ve removed quite a bit of the messy static.
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Hands-on with Facebook Home shows the best mobile Facebook experience to date. The problem is in figuring out who wants it.
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Business battles are often ecosystem battles, in which brands develop a matrix of conveniently connected products and services, in an attempt to lock customers into a dependency. Offline companies follow this tack (think razors and blades). But the internet, with its many connection nodes, crossovers to tangential realms and parallel on-ramps is where ecosystem wars are most elaborately waged.
Only rarely do market conditions cultivate a broader ambition in which a company has a chance to step beyond mere ecosystem competition to a higher level of sovereignty. Facebook’s imminent release of Home represents a stab at that rare imperialism.
Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, HTC, Facebook
Welcome to The After Math, where we attempt to summarize this week’s tech news through numbers, decimal places and percentages
It’s finally Friday, and while the week kicked off with one too many April 1st efforts, the big news for TAM this week is a release date for the Netflix-exclusive fourth season of Arrested Development. Nothing else should matter, but if you think it does, Facebook finally showed off their new game plan for mobile and HTC appeared from the sidelines with a new phone to house it. According to some, Windows Phone has also started to claim a less embarrassing share of the smartphone market too. We crunch and spit out the numbers after the break.
Filed under: Cellphones, Robots, Internet, Alt, Microsoft, HTC, Facebook
Yesterday, Facebook unveiled Facebook Home, which is a new home screen app launcher of sorts that Android users will be able to get for free from the Google Play store starting April 12. CEO Mark Zuckerberg kept reiterating that companies need to put people first and not apps. However, Microsoft says they had the same idea two years ago, so what’s new?
In a company blog post by Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Corporate Communications, Frank Shaw jokes that he tuned into the Facebook Home event yesterday “not to see if it was still April Fools Day, but to see if it was somehow still 2011.” Shaw says that “the content of the presentation was remarkably similar to the launch event…for Windows Phone two years ago.”
Shaw says that the main theme behind creating Windows Phone 7 Mango was to “put people first.” It’s even mentioned in a YouTube video that Microsoft uploaded back in August 2011 (seen below). So essentially, Facebook certainly wasn’t the first company to come up with such a philosophy, but it sure seemed like they tried to make it look like their own.
Furthermore, Shaw bashes Android and says that Microsoft understands Facebook’s reasoning behind wanting to “find a way to bring similar functionality to a platform that is sadly lacking it,” and also notes that Google’s OS “is complicated enough without adding another skin built around another metaphor, on top of what is already a custom variant of the OS.”
Shaw wasn’t done yet, however, and he says that Microsoft applauds Facebook’s effort on giving “some Android owners a taste of what a ‘people-centric’ phone can be like,” however Shaw wants to recommend that people should “get the real thing, and simply upgrade to a Windows Phone.” And once you have it all set up, Microsoft promises “you’ll be feeling even more at ‘home’.”
Microsoft: Facebook Home is so “two years ago” is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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In each issue of Distro, editor-in-chief Tim Stevens publishes a wrap-up of the week in news.
There’s a good chance 2011’s HTC Status, with its portrait QWERTY layout and dedicated Facebook button, never found its way into your social network. That last attempt at the mythical Facebook phone failed to garner much praise, but if social networks gave up so easily, well, we’d all still be using MySpace. HTC and Facebook are at it again, this week launching the $99 First, exclusively on AT&T in the US.
Yes, it’s a name every commenter could love (or hate).
Yes, it’s a name every commenter could love (or hate), a title cheekily reminiscent of the HTC One. This, though, is a rather different device, aiming more toward the mid-range and relying on some serious social integration to make it stand out. It’s the first phone running the Facebook Home interface, which will be available on many devices starting on April 12th. It delivers a far more comprehensive Facebook experience than the previous apps have managed, and intriguingly Zuckerberg himself said that Home is “the next version of Facebook.” The end of the web? Stay tuned.
Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds, Transportation, Internet, HTC, Facebook
There is a new smartphone in town, and although this particular model that is known as the HTC First is not a flagship device, it still managed to capture the attention of the whole world, at least for a few minutes, where it was announced to be the inaugural handset to come with Facebook Home, a new way of using the social network app on your Android-powered smartphone that intends to keep you connected in an even friendlier manner than ever before. The HTC First will be made available as an AT&T exclusive, where and is currently the only smartphone that was designed around Facebook Home, instead of it being the other way around as with most smartphones these days.
First of all, just what is Facebook Home? Well, Facebook Home has touted to be the first mobile experience in the industry which was designed to give you your friends’ latest updates right there and then on your home screen, in addition to checking out messages that will bug you to attend to them regardless of what you are doing at that moment. I guess you can say that this is the ultimate Facebook device, if you cannot get enough of the social network regardless of where you are.
The HTC First can be yours as long as you place a pre-order today for $99.99 a pop, where that will include a two-year commitment, and it will arrive in AT&T stores as well as made online from April 12th onwards. Wait a minute here, what else do we know about the hardware concerning the HTC First? Since it runs on AT&T 4G LTE, you can be assured that LTE connectivity has been thrown into the mix, and there is a quartet of colors to choose from, namely black, white, red and pale blue. The HTC First will come in a thin form factor, looks modern and seamless with soft edges that help draw your attention to the updates from friends and family. In front lies a 4.3-inch glass display, with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean as the operating system of choice. There is a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor to keep things chugging along, too.
Press Release
[ HTC First to arrive on AT&T copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
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