Hasta La Gadget!

Facebook announced a phone! No, Facebook just announced Facebook Home. Facebook announced a home? No, it’s just a home screen. Hmm… what would a real Facebook home actually look like? The guys at Joy of Tech wondered just that and created a comic that shows what Facebook distilled into a home would look like. Foundation built by Winklevii, open doors because no privacy, tunnels for “friends” to come in, Instagram cameras set up at the dinner table and so much more. More »

Investors appear to be cautiously optimistic about the announcements made today regarding Facebook and their new Android smartphone-based software experience. Stocks have jumped over 3% after the Facebook “New Home on Android” event, this allowing the stock to hit $27 and above for the first time in half a month. What we must assume is that the negativity in talk of a Facebook Phone (that is, a complete replacement of the operating system) was doused by the appearance of Facebook Home – a home screen replacement app for Android.

With the reveal of Facebook Home, we’re seeing an experience existing within Android, on top of it – not taking it over entirely. Even when you put your hands on the HTC first, the very first Facebook Home device right out of the box, you’ll be able to turn Facebook Home off if you like. But what of advertisements? And what of the idea that Facebook Home commands the entire user interface you’re working with on your phone?

See our full Facebook Home and HTC first hands-on experience now!

Such things seem to not have struck investors as concerns as the stock hasn’t dropped since before the event began. Now we’ll see if this first smartphone to run the device does well – at $99 USD from AT&T with a 2-year contract, it just might. And we’ll see if Facebook Home is a software experience that people will want to try – or maybe even use regularly.

Have a peek at the timeline below to see the many angles at which Facebook Home has been covered by SlashGear today, and don’t forget to stick to the Android Hub for more on the insides. Also let us know if you’re all about the Facebook Home smartphone experience, if you’ll wait for the tablet edition, or if you’ll be skipping it altogether!

Facebook Phone event sends stock up 3 percent is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This morning we attended the launch of Facebook home, a new integration of Facebook deep inside the Android experience.  Mark Zuckerberg and his team insisted on the fact that this is not a forking of Android and they are not going to build a new phone with a new operating system..

According to Facebook’s CEO, it all started around the idea that smartphones are now build around apps while they should be build around people and the content they love.  From the demos we saw on stage, the result is pretty amazing. Facebook Home provides a really immersive experience while giving quick access to all your communications channels and the people you need to get in touch with, thanks to the innovative Chat Head feature.

(more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: HTC First Running Facebook Home Demo [HD video], Sailfish Mobile OS Demo by Jolla’s CEO Marc Dillon,

So Facebook Home is coming to Android phones. But just the good Android phones. The HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III, Note II, and the new HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4, and HTC First for now. That’s it, that’s the list. If your phone is more than a year old, no Facebook Home for you. And that’s how it has to be, really. More »

It’s the Facebook phone… but it’s every phone. Facebook Home is here, and it wants to take control of your Android experience, a new software suite rather than a specific handset. Unveiled at Facebook HQ this morning, Home arrives on Android via the Play store from April 12 and splashes your photos and friends across the lockscreen and the homescreen. We’ve been playing with Facebook Home today on the HTC First, the first device to fit into Facebook’s Home Program; read on for our first-impressions.

Facebook describes it as designing a phone around people, not apps, and the focus is the very first places you see when you turn on your device. “The homescreen is really the soul of your phone” Mark Zuckerberg said during the presentation, and Home works as that replacement launcher, with Cover Feed to make those friends your core menu, and Chat Heads to streamline talking to them.

Loading Home is like any other Android app, though it does have one extra hook into the OS. Since it’s designed as a replacement launcher, to be used instead of the regular Android one rather than alongside it, you can choose to have it open by default whenever you hit the home button on your device. At that point, consider your phone Facebookafied.

Alternatively, you can grab the HTC First, which has Home preloaded by default. Either way, the lockscreen and homescreen are swapped for Coverfeed: full-screen, chromeless pictures pulled from your friends’ updates, with discrete icons at the bottom showing “Likes” and comments. Double-tapping the image automatically likes it. Meanwhile, pulling up the bubble near the bottom of the screen – which shows your own Facebook profile picture – gives you a choice of three options: Facebook, the app launcher, and jumping back into your last-used app.

The app launcher is basically a pared-down tray of apps, where Facebook expects you to keep your most-commonly used titles. At the top, meanwhile, there are shortcuts to add Facebook status updates or photos. A side-swipe pulls over the full app drawer from the left, from which you can drag over icons to the quick launcher tray. No widgets beyond Facebook’s own Coverfeed, however.

The other big introduction with Facebook Home is Chat Heads, a new integrated messaging system that’s designed to discretely pervade the whole device. Get a new message – whether it’s a Facebook Chat or an SMS – and a small circular bubble pops up in the upper right hand corner. You can drag it around (useful, since it’ll show up on top of any app you’re currently using it, including full-screen games) and tap it to open it, at which point a conversation view opens up floating on top of whatever you were doing.

Whether it’s a Facebook conversation or a text message one is shown by the color of the voice bubble boxes themselves, and you can have multiple conversations open at once, switching between them with the row of circles along the top. Facebook group messages are also supported, with a thumbnail of the group icons clustered in the circle. Similarly swipeable notifications include missed calls and calendar alerts.

It’s certainly slick, as long as you live your social – and, by extension, mobile – life in Facebook. The complexity of a regular phone is hidden away under full-screen images, and the familiar iconography should prove welcoming for Facebook-addicts. Those who divide their time between multiple networks – such as Google+, or Twitter – might find those edged out, however, as Facebook Home’s notifications system is designed to cater for its own alerts, not those of others.

It certainly seems to make the most sense on a device that has been designed with Home in mind, the first of which – though Samsung, Huawei and others have committed to join in – is the HTC First. The phone itself is a slim, simple slice of soft-touch plastic, fronted with a glass 4.3-inch touchscreen above three touch-sensitive buttons for back, home, and menu. It’s also worth noting that the First does indeed support displaying all Android notifications, not just Facebook ones, and will come preloaded with Instagram.

The slightly out-of-date OS is also likely to be less of a big deal: the First hides Android 4.1 Jelly Bean under Home, running on a dualcore Snapdragon 400 processor and paired with multimode 3G/4G for roaming LTE use. AT&T will have the first taste of the First, at $99.99 with a new, two-year agreement from April 12, though it’ll also be coming to the UK and Europe on EE and Orange later in the year.

Facebook’s strategy – focusing on its software for many devices, not software and hardware for just one – does make some sense. Dedicating yourself to a single device doesn’t make sense when you want to appeal to every Facebook user who has an Android phone, after all. What remains to be seen is whether even those who are totally devoted to Facebook will be willing to immerse themselves so entirely in the experience.

Zuckerberg’s stats suggest Facebook mobile use is by far the most common thing smartphone owners are doing with their handsets. We’re not quite so convinced, and while the garden isn’t entirely walled – you can obviously get to other Android apps, they’re just not placed front and center like Facebook is – we’ve seen things like HTC’s own BlinkFeed on the HTC One giving immersive Facebook updates without also ousting every other news feed, Twitter, and other notifications. Meanwhile, the Facebook Home Program seems unlikely to take off until prepaid devices arrive; $99.99 with agreement gets you a decent smartphone these days, after all, and one which isn’t dominated by a single service, however sociable that might be.

Facebook Home and HTC First Hands-on is written by Vincent Nguyen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.