Skip to footer

Should you download Facebook Home?

The Facebook Home suite of apps and the HTC First – the first smartphone to come prepackaged with Home – both launch today. Whether or not you should pick them up may depend on how chained you are to Facebook. 

|
Facebook
Facebook Home, a new suite of Android apps, launched today on the Google Play store.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Call it Home-coming day. 

Facebook Home, a new suite of Android apps, debuted today on the Google Play store – and assuming you've got one of the phones capable of running the software (The Verge has a good list) and Android 4.0 or higher, you can download the whole package right now.

Meanwhile, along with the Facebook Home software, today is also the launch day for the mid-range HTC First handset, the first phone to come prepackaged with Facebook Home. 

So should you download the Facebook Home software? It depends on what kind of user you are. Casual Facebook users – the kind of folks who sign on every couple of days, for instance – are likely not going to be that interested in turning their entire interface into a gigantic Facebook feed. But if you're a regular Facebook user (and that's probably a lot of you), you may like having all those Facebook functionalities right at your finger tips. 

Over at The Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg calls home "the boldest attempt by any non-hardware company to alter a phone’s native user interface." 

Mr. Mossberg found some downsides to the software – for instance, it blocks or otherwise obscures some key Android apps, including the one-step camera icon – but in general, his write-up was a favorable one, as were most reviews. 

"I found Facebook Home to be easy to use, elegantly designed and addictive," he writes. "Although I’m a regular Facebook user, I found that, with Home, I paid more attention than ever to my news feed, Liked items more often and used Facebook’s Messenger service more often. So, if you are a big Facebook fan, Facebook Home can be a big win."

As for the HTC First phone, reactions have been a little more mixed. It's worth noting that the First is not a high-powered phone – with its $99 list price (with a contract, of course), dual-core processor, and 5-megapixel camera, the First lags well behind its top-of-the-line competitors. The Verge calls the camera on the device "muddy" and Ars Technica points out that, in terms of speed, the First is best compared to older handsets such as the LG Optimus G. 

The HTC First, notes Alex Colon of PC Mag, is "a decent choice for the money, and a decent choice if you can't be bothered to load the Facebook Home suite onto a different Android phone. But you can get the Samsung Galaxy S III for the same price as the First, and that gets you a bigger screen, a microSD card slot, a better camera, and Samsung's TouchWiz UI layer." 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Should you download Facebook Home?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0412/Should-you-download-Facebook-Home
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe