If you want to do more on your smartphone than just use Facebook, then you don't
want Home.
Introduced last week, Home is the new interface that the social network has
designed for Android smartphones. Instead of applications or widgets, Home puts
Facebook pictures and posts front and center.
The problem with Home is that it offers both more and less of Facebook than many
people are likely to want. Although it puts Facebook at the center of your
smartphone experience, it offers only a limited slice of the social networking
site and little ability to customize your experience.
I've been testing Home for the past several days on an HTC First smartphone,
which is _ as the name suggests _ the first device to come with the software
preinstalled. Consumers will be able to buy the First or download Home to a
handful of other Android devices starting Friday.
The Home software replaces not only the default Android interface, but the lock
screen as well. When you turn on your phone, you see a picture posted by one of
your Facebook friends, the time, a virtual button with your face on it and, in
the middle of the screen, any alerts or notifications you may have. If you leave
the device on _ but don't touch it _ it will flip through a succession of
pictures with status updates overlaid on top, one at a time, all full-screen.
But Home is about more than just Facebook posts.
One of its other major features is a new way of sending messages that allows you
to chat with your Facebook friends even when you leave Home. Friends with whom
you are exchanging Facebook or text messages show up as "chat heads," which are
your friends' Facebook profile pictures that have been turned into round virtual
buttons.
These buttons sit on top of Home or other applications. If you tap on them,
they'll display your ongoing conversation as a kind of window on top of whatever
app you are in. Tap the chat head again, and the conversation closes.
Because the chat heads are about the size of the home button on an iPhone, they
can be a bit obtrusive, covering up parts of the screen. But you can move them
around if they are blocking something. And the ability to jump in and out of a
chat without leaving the app you're in is a great feature.
Home also allows users to easily update their Facebook status, post pictures to
the social network or check-in someplace and broadcast their location to their
friends.
Oh, yeah, and it will also allow you to launch and run your Android apps _ that
is, if you can make your way past all the Facebook features.
Because that's the explicit point of Home: It's a way of re-imagining the
interface of a smartphone with social networking, not apps, at the center. In
Home, apps are second-class citizens. In fact, unless you touch the home button
or your personal icon on the home screen, you don't even see a place in Home to
access apps. And if you turn off the device while in an app, you don't go back
to the app when you turn it back on; instead, you go back to Home.
If Home were just another app that you could jump into and out of as you saw
fit, it would be great because it's so mesmerizing and engrossing. It makes you
want to keep scrolling through your friends' updates.
But Home is much more than a typical app. Unless you turn it off or uninstall
it, it just doesn't go away. Instead, it's the default way you interact with
your phone. And the impression it gives is that it's all you can do with your
phone.
At the same time, Home is a frustratingly limited version of Facebook. Right now
you can't view videos in Home. You also can't customize what posts you see in
it; for example, you can't specify that you only want Home to show posts from
your close friends.
And because Home is little more than a layer that sits on top of Android, it's
not well-integrated into the standard Android apps. If you are using the Chrome
browser on the First, you might think that there would be a simple button that
would allow you to share a Web page on Facebook. But there's not.
So while Home offers more of Facebook than you're likely to want, it gives you
fewer ways of interacting with the social network than you probably would like.
For now, I'd advise staying a long way from Home.
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FACEBOOK HOME INTERFACE FOR ANDROID
_Troy's rating: 6.0 (out of 10)
-- Likes: Full-screen posts can be mesmerizing; messaging feature allow users to
chat with friends without leaving their apps; makes it easy to post updates to
Facebook.
-- Dislikes: Makes other applications harder to access and demotes their
importance; doesn't display video posts; doesn't allow users to customize which
updates they view; isn't well integrated with other apps on the phone.
-- Price: Comes preinstalled on the $100 _ with a two-year contract _ HTC First
phone; available as a free download for several other Android smartphones.
Available starting Friday.
-- Web: www.facebook.com or www.htc.com
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ABOUT THE WRITER:
Troy Wolverton is a technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News.
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(c)2013 San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)
Distributed by MCT Information Services
