If you didn’t know everything there is to know about the HTC One smartphone already, you’re certainly about to. HTC is unleashing a presentation series they’re calling the HTC One Live Experience tour here in the United States, each stop designed to show off the capabilities of the HTC One smartphone. Each of the following three distinct executions of HTC One skills will be appearing in 11 major markets across the USA: HTC BoomSound Lounge, HTC One Showrooms and HTC One Cinema Experiences.
This campaign will of course also make it clear once again that you’ll be able to pre-order the HTC One through a series of sources right this minute for delivery on the 19th of April – you’ll want to pick one up from AT&T here at the start or wait for the T-Mobile release “later this spring”! You’ll find the 32GB edition available for $199.99 on a two-year contract while the $299.99 64GB edition will be available exclusively at AT&T.
Product experience stops will be accented by several HTC BoomSound Lounges which will provide some lucky fans the opportunity to see 1,000 fan limited engagements with a variety of musical artists. You’ll find Pharrell in New York, the Manchester Orchestra in Los Angeles, and Grouplove in Chicago!
HTC BoomSound Lounges can be found at: • Columbus Circle in New York • Embarcadero Plaza in San Francisco • Hollywood and Highland in Los Angeles • Wrigleyville in Chicago • Franklin Square in Philadelphia • Perimeter Mall in Atlanta
HTC One Showrooms will be appearing in: • Atlanta • Chicago • Dallas • Houston • Los Angeles • New York • San Francisco • Washington, D.C.
Have a peek at our massive HTC One tag portal for more information and check the HTC One timeline below for more hands-on action than you can handle!
Nokia courted fashionistas back at Mobile World Congress with the Lumia 720, and it’s ready to embrace them more fully now that the slim Windows Phone is rolling out to its first countries. We’ve already seen it launch in Australia and the UK, where it’s available for free when subscribing to relatively frugal postpaid plans of either $29 AUD (on Virgin Mobile Australia) or £22 (on O2 UK); Brits can also spend £300 at O2 to use the phone on a pay-as-you-go basis. Other countries will get their units in short order, including Italy next week (for €349 off-contract) and Russia. As a reminder, it’s not coming to the US in an official capacity: while the mid-tier device made a visit to the FCC, the absence of LTE largely precludes American carrier deals. Some of us will have to gaze on the Lumia 720 from afar as a result, but many of those craving the most stylish of Nokia smartphones can get some satisfaction very shortly.
GameStop has been operating a trade-in program for electronics for a while now. This program allows you to trade-in gadgets such as smartphones, tablets, and MP3 players that you no longer need for store credit. That store credit can be used towards the purchase of just about anything else you might desire including video games and gaming accessories.
GameStop has announced that it is expanding its electronics trade-in program to cover additional smartphone models. The trade-in program is now valid for cash or in-store credit on smartphones from Samsung, BlackBerry, and Motorola at all of the game retailers US locations. People looking to trade devices in soon can also take advantage of a special deal.
From now until April 28 GameStop is offering some additional incentives. On items with a trade-in value between $20 and $49.99, you get an extra $10 of in-store credit. Items valued at $50 to $124.99 are eligible for an extra $25 in store credit. If you trade-in an item valued at $125 more you can get an extra $50 of in-store credit.
Customers that are PowerUp Rewards Pro members can get even more extra in-store credit with an extra $15, $35, and $70 of in-store credit for those same three trade-in value levels. The sort of trade-in program is a nice way to get rid of devices you have put in your desk or sock drawer and use the money to buy some new video games or game hardware.
Samsung has announced it first-quarter earnings (the full data won’t be in until April 26), and things are looking mighty fine for the Korean company. According to its estimates, it experienced a 53-percent rise in profit from January to March, raking in $7.7 billion. This is Samsung’s fifth record quarter in a row, and expectations are only going up as the GALAXY S 4, revealed last month, is destined to hit shelves in the coming weeks.
Samsung is worth about $220 billion, and is putting increasing pressure on Apple, its biggest competitor. Total sales for the quarter came in at 52 trillion won, with estimating putting smartphones sales between 68 million and 70 million, an increase from the 63 million sold last quarter. Out of its vast line of handsets, the Note and Galaxy S series’ are the most popular.
Smartphones are fueling Samsung’s profits, with the GALAXY S 3 having been a wild bestseller and lower-end Galaxy handsets selling well in locations like China and India. Not surprisingly, the mobile division is bringing in the most profits. According to Bloomberg, it’s Q1 mobile division profits were likely about 6.25 trillion won.
Although the mobile division is its powerhouse, Samsung’s display business also brings in quite a bit of its own profit. Bloomberg reports that the division likely saw a profit increase during the first quarter over last year, although estimates vary based on who you ask. The final numbers will be announced in a couple weeks, and we’ll be ready when they do, so stay tuned!
This week the Android user experience known as Facebook Home has been revealed, and with it, whispers of advertisements served to you front and center. Not unlike what you’ve seen with Kindle series of tablets, the Facebook Home app will indeed be serving advertisements to you through the lockscreen portion of the UI. What’s not known at the moment is if this will be a reality just on the app download version of Home or if it’ll be present on the Facebook Phone experience too.
If you’ll take a peek at our Facebook Phone vs Facebook Home article you’ll find that there are indeed a few differences between the two. With the app download you’ll not be getting notifications from all of your apps the way you will with the HTC first smartphone (see our hands-on here!) With advertisements popping up in the Question and Answer portion of the presentation today, we must assume there’s another big feature difference between the two.
“There are no ads in this [Facebook Home] yet, I’m sure that one day there will be.” – Mark Zuckerberg
After being asked about advertisements and hearing that response, another Facebook team member made it clear that ads would be coming to the Cover Feed portion of the Facebook Home experience. Soon after this, Zuckerberg was asked to repeat whether or not there’d be ads on the Cover Feed – responding with a resounding “yup!”, it was made clear that Facebook believes “[advertisements] are just another kind of content.”
Another question was asked during the Q and A session on searching:
Q: How will what I search for influence the ads I see?
A: Searches will be tracked in your activity log, and search won’t influence ads at all.
So no worries on having your activities tracked in Facebook Home… for advertising through the search bar, anyway. Sound reasonable to you? Let us know if you’re all about the Facebook Home experience right this minute!
The Facebook Phone will be coming to the UK with EE exclusively, this being the first time that EE has had an exclusive of such magnitude with the HTC first. This HTC first device will be available this summer on EE’s own 4GEE service but no pricing or release dates have yet been released. In the United States, the HTC first will be coming to AT&T on the 12th of April, 2013 – so we must assume this release won’t be long after!
The HTC first is the first Facebook Phone right out of the box, it working with the new Facebook Home Android app experience. This software creates a full Facebook experience for anyone using it as their homescreen launcher, decidedly separate from Android’s core. With this app you’ll be getting Facebook Home updates on the 12th of every month (according to Facebook) and you’ll have full access to your Facebook content.
You’ll be seeing the following unique bits and pieces coming from this EE release of the HTC first as well:
• EE Film – the only service in the UK which combines 2 for 1 cinema ticketing, listings, trailers and digital film downloads in one place • A discount of £5 per month on EE superfast Fibre Broadband – so they can get blistering speeds at home and on the move • Fast track customer service by dialing ‘33’ from their handset • Clone Phone Lite – giving people free storage to back up the content that matters most
Have a peek at the timeline below for more information on the HTC first as well as our Android Hub for more Android excellence through the future! In our brand new Facebook Home tag portal you’ll find all you need to know about this new experience and about the future of Facebook on your smartphone!
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.
This week the Facebook Home Android homescreen replacement experience has been revealed, and with it no lack of questions on the part of future users. While many users will be downloading Facebook Home as an app from the Google Play store, there will be a variety of smartphones being released in the coming months that have Facebook Home loaded right out of the box. The HTC first is the first of these, it also being the first smartphone to have Instagram out of the box – so what’s the difference between your experience there and your experience on the smartphone you’ve got now with Facebook Home loaded to it?
According to Facebook, the differences are quite small at the moment – while the first answer given by the Facebook crew at the main event today was a bit dodgy, Mark Zuckerberg himself made things clear.
Any differences between downloaded version of Home vs embedded experience on the HTC first?
The new user setup experience is much cleaner, and the opportunity to get other notifications (like Spotify) is better integrated.”
Zuckerberg: we’re going to try to work with OEMs going forward to expose different hooks that aren’t normally available to Android without OEM support.
So there you have it, folks – for now the differences are essentially non-existent.
UPDATE: This point has been clarified – the downloaded version of Facebook Home will not have notifications from apps outside of Facebook in its main Cover Feed – if you purchase a Facebook Phone, any app you download will work with notifications inside Facebook Home.
With the HTC first we’re sure to see the smallest amount of difference between a downloaded experience and the handset with the software installed on it out of the box. In the future when companies like Samsung, Sony, Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo, and ALCATEL ONE TOUCH start in on the party, we might see more.
Be sure to stick around our Android Hub for more action on the smartphone front, and have a peek at the timeline below to get all the Facebook Phone sweetness!
So who are the lucky people who get to try out Facebook Home first? Well it turns out that those of us who have an HTC One, HTC One X (X+), Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung GALAXY S4, or a Samsung Galaxy Note II will be able to take advantage of Facebook Home when it launches on April 12th. That way you won’t have to grab Facebook and HTC’s lackluster HTC First in order to take advantage of Facebook’s new product.
The HTC First is unappealing, however at the right price point, it may be able to snag some sales. It comes with a dual-core Snapdragon 400 processor, 1GB of RAM, 5MP rear-facing camera, 1.3MP front-facing camera, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, AT&T 4G LTE, and will be the first phone designed around Facebook Home. The specs aren’t jaw-dropping, however if the phone was priced at $49.99, or even for free, it may do well.
Facebook Home is a series of apps that make Facebook the center of your phone. Facebook’s theme for today is that phones should center around people, and not around apps. Facebook Home will bring you Cover Feed, which brings you updates from your friends all in real-time. It’ll be the first thing you see when you open your app. You will also get notifications from apps and friends straight on your home screen. Chat Heads lets you message you friends while you do other things like surf the web or watch videos.
Facebook Home is set to launch on April 12th, and you get to decide whether or not its something jaw-dropping. From the looks of it, it does look pretty interesting, and I’m glad Facebook decided to release it as just an app, rather than an entire OS. That way if you don’t like it, you can revert back to your original Android experience. Be sure to check out our timeline below, and our Facebook Tag Portal for the latest Facebook news. Also check out our Android Hub for the latest, important info on Android.
Facebook Home brings a variety of features that make it more than just an app. One of the new features will be the new “Cover Feed”. Cover Feed will be the first thing you see when you open Facebook Home. It will bring you the latest and important status updates from your closest friends as soon as you open the app. That will make sure that you never miss out on an important event again.
Facebook is concentrating on making your phone more about people rather than just apps, something that Zuckerberg has been echoing throughout the entire event. With Cover Feed and Facebook Home, you will always be connected with your closest friends and family members. Everything is available to you at a moment’s notice. Like Zuckerberg said, everything is just “one swipe away”.
Facebook Home will be available on the upcoming HTC First, that is set to be announced. It does feature lackluster specs, including a dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, 1GB of RAM, 5MP rear-facing camera, and a 1.6MP front-facing camera. The only things carrying the device are 4G LTE and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. However, luckily for us Facebook lovers, there are plans for more phones coming in the future.
Alongside Facebook’s Cover Feed, Facebook has announced another new feature called Chat Heads, that gives you an “immediate personal connection” to those you’re close with. Even if you’re using another app, if someone messages you, you will be notified via a bubble on the top corner of your phone. Be sure to check through the latest Facebook news today through our Facebook Tag Portal. Also check out our Android Hub for the latest, important info on Android.
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