Facebook Phone

Most folks speculated that Facebook was working on their own phone operating system to compete with Apple and Google, amongst others. Pundits were partially right, as Facebook last week announced two products - 'Facebook Home' and the HTC First - that give them a foothold in the mobile OS space.
The subtle difference between the predictions of a new, Facebook phone and what Facebook actually announced is actually quite brilliant - instead of developing, testing, deploying, and marketing a whole new operating system that would have required them to partner with phone makers, they instead stood on the shoulders of giants (Google in this case) and simply built an experience on top of Android, the most popular phone operating system out there. Now let me back up a little bit about what this means. Google allows developers to build what are called 'Launchers' on top of their Android operating system that can customize the look and feel as well as some of the features of the operating system that runs on your phone. What Facebook did was build a new experience, complete with a new look and feel, apps, a new home screen and a new lock screen.

Facebook phone features, actually called Facebook Home, is an add-on experience to the standard Android Operating System that is very 'people focused'. What this means is instead of seeing apps and notifications first, Facebook Home replaces your standard home screen and lock screen with a new photo-centered home screen (called Cover Feed) showing popular and interesting photos from friends and also replaces your home screen with a beautiful new Facebook-centric screen showing apps like Instagram, Facebook Messenger and the Facebook app amongst others. Another new feature, floating 'Chat Heads' are available inside of any app you're using, which allows for not only a seamless chat experience but also blurs the lines between SMS, Facebook Messages, and whatever app you're using at the time. What's great about this approach is that it gives users who want to image:

Overall, the experience looks to be a beautiful new way to look at social media integration into phones. Whether or not you think this is a good thing is most likely dependent on your feelings about Facebook, as it truly dominates the lock and home screen experiences on the phones that have this installed. Further, it'll be interesting to see how this looks and feels in the real world. It's one thing to see all of the beautiful photography on your home screen that are part of the official Facebook Home website, but what happens when your lock screen is overwhelmed with photos of food, other people's kids, or other potentially bothersome imagery?
Facebook says they will be iterating on this experience every month or so, and it'll be interesting to see where this goes and how long until we see a full-fledged Facebook OS to power future phones. For now, Facebook Home and the HTC First is the most beautiful way to use Android if the tradeoff of having social media constantly in your face is worth it to you.

By : Hermawan Candra Kusuma - 125150200111094