Facebook Portal Plus is designed for remote workers

Long ago, in April 2020, during our first lockdown, I wrote that the Facebook portal was the perfect gadget for the pandemic. The portal has a smart camera that can follow you around the room with a wide-angle lens, which means unlike laptops or iPads, it’s easy for two people to adjust to the screen. The perfect use case is for Grandma and Grandpa to use it to video chat with the grandchildren (if you’ve ever seen two Baby Boomers trying to put both faces together in one phone for FaceTime, you would have understood it). Grandparents around the world were eager to pinch their little cheeks, but those same grandparents were the most vulnerable to COVID-19, so the distance was kept. The portal offered a temporary solution.

Now that vaccinated grandparents are cautiously visiting the family, Facebook wants the portal to focus its gaze on a new target: your work. The latest Portal + model, with a bigger screen, is designed in the hope that you (or your boss) will use it for all those business video calls you’ve been making on your crappy laptop for the past year and a half. “This is in addition to the existing toolkit that the average person tries to work remotely,” said Andrew Bosworth, vice president of Reality Labs at Facebook.

The Portal + screen tilts to adjust and is intended to sit on a desk. It’s a less bulky and sleek design than the older Portal +, which had a screen that could swivel to become vertical for portrait style (Bosworth said they noticed most people kept it in landscape mode. most of the time).

“Very early in the pandemic, we realized, Oh it’s a tool we should do more development on“Bosworth said.” We started to be guided more and more by two use cases: connecting with family and friends, and then being successful in your home office. “

Facebook released portals to most of its full-time employees when it became clear last spring that the office wouldn’t be reopening anytime soon. Bosworth said he and his colleagues had grown used to having a dedicated display for video calls and saw the benefit of not using their computers for those calls. People seemed less distracted and more engaged with their coworkers (it’s harder to quietly check Twitter, which can be a disadvantage for you). They have become a valuable breeding ground for product testers. One thing Bosworth and his team heard from the employees was that they wanted the gate, which should stay plugged into the wall, to be portable, so they could move it from room to room.

That’s exactly what the new Portal Go does – it runs on battery power so you can move it around while you chat. At $ 199, it replaces the smaller, less expensive 8-inch Portal Mini that will be discontinued.

The smart camera that tracks you was the portal’s biggest feature, making it the best video chat device for the price. But now there is competition. Apple iPads now have a feature called “Center Stage” that follows you around the room on a FaceTime or Zoom call. An entry-level iPad now costs around $ 20 less than the Portal +, and an iPad certainly Is more than a portal.

Facebook’s hardware and AR / VR ambitions seem to have gone from fun (family chat and games) to work. Recently, he announced Workroom Horizons, a virtual reality business meeting where you use the Oculus Quest headset to send an avatar of yourself to sit in a meeting room with the avatars of your other coworkers.

There is also a software update for the portal home screen. It adds some much needed features like more widgets on your home screen especially a very useful calendar. Now you can just tap a Calendar Zoom link on the Home screen instead of manually entering the meeting ID. Portal also has WebEx and GoToMeeting, and finally adds Microsoft Teams (starting in December). Google Meet is not yet supported.

Another added feature is the ability to use end-to-end encryption for portal calls made through Facebook Messenger (calls made through WhatsApp were already end-to-end encrypted). It’s not the default, however, you need to register for it for the call, which is how it currently works on the standard Messenger app for your phone.

The most intriguing sign that Facebook is serious about making the portal a remote working device is a new service called Portal for Business. This allows employees to log into the portal not with their personal Facebook accounts but with a dedicated Facebook for Work account (this functionality is currently being tested with a few companies and will be extended in 2022). It also allows your company’s IT department to control your device as if it were a corporate laptop, including the ability to remotely wipe the device if it is lost or stolen.

Making those devices more user-friendly has a positive side effect for Facebook: you might not want to spend $ 349 on a Portal +, but your business could buy it for you.

Here is the part where I have to put in the warning about how you, a person who reads the news and is interested in technology and probably has opinions on Facebook, can be somewhat skeptical about buying an entrance. Let me allay the usual fears you might have: Facebook isn’t spying on you through the camera, it doesn’t steal your face, it doesn’t listen to you when it’s turned off (it has voice control, but you can turn it off). And if you don’t have a Facebook account, you can now log in and use it completely through WhatsApp. If privacy is your big concern here, well, that’s fine.

If you’re worried about Facebook making some, uh, questionable decisions over the last few years, well, yeah. You should. As recently as last week, the Wall Street Journal released a series of reports on Facebook’s problems showing the company not only mismanaged an incident or topic, but also deep systemic issues related to how the company makes decisions about running a platform with one billion users.

One report was about how Instagram ignored or downplayed its own internal research that showed negative effects on teen mental health from using the app. The Wall Street Journal got emails from executives saying that while their latest internal research showed that hiding likes didn’t make much of a difference in adolescent mental health, it would look good in the press and for parents if they would go ahead with launching a feature to hide likes.

There are fewer obvious ways Portal is an imminent threat to democracy and our well-being. The issues Facebook has faced for years: moderation, political extremism, misinformation, crime, and the distorted view of perfect bodies and lives on Instagram are not really the Portal’s purview. The portal is a nice and cheerful device that simply allows you to chat with your family or colleagues. It’s no problem. Actually the biggest problem was keeping it plugged in, which was vaguely inconvenient, and they solved it with the Portal Go!

You might be someone who loves Facebook and can’t wait to use a portal for work. You might be someone who hates Facebook with such passion that you would rather quit your job than be forced to use one if your company sent the device to you for free. Or you can be someone who has problems with Facebook but can put them aside to take advantage of a portal, like take advantage Annie hall despite the human behind. Look, I don’t know you. I’m not even sure I want to. But we can chat on Portal and find out.