For the New Year, Santa brought a “smart speaker with a monitor” Facebook Portal.
Every time we go to our friends in New York, we sneak a peek at something of theirs. The time before last, we brought back the idea of a bicycle, last time—the idea of a robot vacuum, and this time—a little screen for the kitchen that can handle news, music, and calls.
Since there is not much information about Facebook Go online, I decided to drop it here. Maybe it will be useful to someone. The device was bought to listen to and watch news in the kitchen. We haven’t had a TV for many years, and using laptops in the kitchen isn’t really convenient. And out of all the talking assistants, the Facebook “Go” seemed most appealing.
Interesting features include:
* A movable wide-angle camera (125°), which follows your face or faces. For example, when you move closer or walk left-right, the camera turns with internal servomotors, so the face is almost always in the frame without wide-angle distortions. This is the coolest feature.
* portable
* very decent sound (5W + woofer 20W)
* good microphones
* photo-gallery for idle-mode (photo frame mode) — directly from Instagram and Facebook. A tap on the photos shows comments from Instagram
* calls to Messenger and WhatsApp in one click or one “say” (Call Rauf).
* supports Alexa. But there is also its own Hey Portal
* integration with Spotify and Pandora. I have a premium account on Spotify, works great.
* supports YouTube
* excellent screen with almost 180° viewing angle
* can call from the mobile app to the portal, but oddly, you can’t call from the portal to your own messenger.
Downsides:
* The app store exists but only has a couple dozen apps. For example, there are no messenger apps at all
* Supports multiple accounts, but switching them has to be done manually (with two taps), but the browser, for example, is shared across all accounts. In the end, if you switch from Nadya’s to my account, YouTube in the browser will still be logged in under Nadya. And Spotify is tied to all accounts (but this is not a problem).
* All searches in Spotify/Pandora are voice-only. You can’t type a band name, only speak it. Some you can hardly pronounce
* sadly, there’s no app for YouTube. Sadly, different accounts for YouTube are not supported
* oddly, there’s no app even for FB and Instagram. They could have been really cool. But anyway, you can still watch FB stories and posts, even scroll through them with voice (useless stuff)
* oddly, you can’t call from the portal to your own messenger or to the Portal app on mobile. In other words, to call Nadya from home, I need to change my profile to mine before calling (and then switch it back)
* no “auto pick-up” (drop-in) for calls from certain numbers. That would have been very convenient. Especially for elderly people. And to entertain a dog.
* does not support Netflix. Hard to explain why. Both FB and Netflix would benefit from it.
* the cradle is not very convenient. Put it slightly at the wrong angle – it doesn’t charge (and that needs to be noticed)
* if you’re watching YouTube on your phone, and then you want to continue watching on Portal, it’s not easy to do. You need to go into History on YouTube, and press on the last video. And if you watched from a different account on your phone, then it’s really unclear how to do it.
* no water protection at all. Kind of so-so for a kitchen, really
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 