Facebook Home is a new product announced by Facebook few days back and it acts as a home screen for your Android phone and also integrated deeply into your Facebook account. Facebook had also announced a new phone, HTC First, running the Facebook home and is all set to release on April 12th. But before the official release, the pre-release build was leaked and was made available for download for all Android phones. Although the build is incomplete as many features are not yet implemented and has quite a lot of bugs, you can still test out the look and feel of Android’s new home.
Facebook Home provides you with Facebook experience featuring full-screen photos, status updates, and notifications.
We tested the new Facebook Home on Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.2.2 and here are the impressions on the new Android home.
As of now there are three APKs you need to install, first is the new Facebook app, second is the Facebook Messenger and third the actual Facebook Home. Once the installation is complete, you can click on the home button on your Android and you can select the Facebook Home from there. To get started, you need to login with your Facebook ID. The app optionally asks you whether you want to search for your contacts on Facebook. If you do not want this feature, you can skip it.
Once you have set up, you can see the new home screen is filled with updates and images from your timeline, you can swipe through them. You might see your profile bubble at the bottom, which shows you profile picture. This is the place from where you navigate to other areas on your phone. When you click and hold the bubble, you can see three options pop up, first is camera, second is Apps and finally there is Facebook.
We couldn’t test the camera functionality as it is disabled in this build. When you scroll the home screen, you get to see the updates from your friends and double click on any image likes the image or update. You can also view the comments and add your comments all without actually opening the Facebook app.
Any new notifications you receive will be shown on the home screen and you can swipe them away or click them to open it.
Moving your profile bubble to apps brings the app drawer. You can see your home screen (which you already had on your phone) along with the complete app list. The full list of apps is a vertical scroll unlike the horizontal one on core Android.
Once you install the Facebook Home, one thing you would probably notice is that the Android’s notification center is completely gone, but not to worry, you can bring it back from the Facebook home settings.
There are quite a lot of tweaks available in the app, probably because this is a dev build. We are not sure if these will come in the final build of Facebook home.
So is Facebook Home worth it? Yes, to an extend as it brings a nice full screen view of your timeline and a neat way to manage your Facebook. But this will probably hold good for people who are totally into Facebook. Moreover, it will take some time to get used to the controls since you have been using and managing your Android phone on a different level.
One issue we found about the Facebook home is that it will show the timeline and allows you to scroll them even when the phone is locked and this could be a privacy issue. We need to wait till April 12th when the final build is out and we might probably see more changes.
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