Facebook Portal Review: Failure of Trust

It is rare for a new gadget to be announced and I do not want to get my hands on it right away. I am an extreme early adopter, both by profession and by inclination. But when the new Facebook portal and the Plus portal were announced a month ago, my answer was a "no thank you" firm. And I am not alone: ​​after a year of scandals on data privacy, the first reactions of many people to the portal, a smart device display with a microphone always listening and d & # 39; a camera always looking, landed between hesitation and repulsion.

The $ 199 portal and the largest $ 349 portal are not the first smart screens of this type, and Amazon and Google already have similar products on the market. But while the Amazon Echo Show and Google-powered smart screens are designed to perform a range of tasks, from controlling smart gadgets to playing videos, the portal has an almost unique goal: make video calls to the video. 39; Facebook Messenger help to other Facebook Messenger users.

To this end, the portal works very well. Last week, I used both models to make calls to the office – and across the country – and the portal provided a better experience than any other smart display I've used. It also worked better than a smartphone or tablet to make video calls, which I can not say for Echo Show or Lenovo Smart Display. As a versatile intelligent display, however, the portal is far behind the competition.

While the portal excels in its role as videophone for the modern era, I remain deeply uncomfortable with the idea of ​​a camera connected to Facebook at home.

The 10.1-inch portal and the huge 15.6-inch portal Plus both have a modern design that would not look great in a fashionable home. The smaller model looks a lot like Amazon's Echo Show, while the Plus reminds me of an in-store kiosk you'd use to place an order for Big Mac. Both are quite well assembled, with quality plastic materials, bright and responsive touch screens, and speakers that can easily fill music in a medium to large room.

The Portal Plus has not only a larger screen and more powerful speakers, but it also has something the smaller model can not shoot: its screen rotates 90 degrees to move from landscape to portrait orientation. The hinge is smooth, but stable, and just one finger to change orientation. This is probably my favorite hardware detail on the product. These are surprisingly nice materials for a first-generation product; The main disadvantage of both models is that they take up a lot of space, especially the Portal Plus.

Of course, apart from the screen, the camera and the microphones of the portal are the main objects with which you will spend time interacting. Both models use the same camera and microphone systems: a four-microphone array with a 360-degree beamforming input and a 12-megapixel camera with a 140-degree field of view and a digital zoom up to 39 to 8x. This configuration allows the gate to see and hear you, no matter where you move in the room.

It's really the big differentiator of the portal compared to other smart screens. Although Amazon and Google devices have similar groups of distant microphones, their cameras are not nearly as good as those in the portal. While the portal camera is technically fixed, Facebook has developed intelligent software capable of identifying human forms (the company tells me do not followed by the face) and automatically crop the video view. As I move around the room, the camera "follows" as if it has the ability to move and zoom in on its lens. Amazon Echo Show has only one fixed position for its camera, and it's often not ideal.

This automatic framing, called "smart camera" by Facebook, facilitates participation in each video call. I do not have to worry about finding myself in the right place for the other person to see me. I can just move. about freely and knowing that they will be able to see me and hear me without any problem. It's also easier to use than a smartphone or tablet, where I have to keep the hardware in place all the time and basically be the cameraman for my own video call. The portal removes all these hassles.

The audio and video quality of calls on the portal is also much better than calls on Facebook Messenger on mobile devices, or even other services such as Apple's FaceTime or Zoom business video conferencing that we use every day at The edge. The image is sharp, bright, with a high cadence, and the sound is clear and easy to hear without anyone having to raise their voice. Facebook states that the portal creates "virtual microphones" for each person in communication, then uses the beamforming technology of its physical microphones to render its voice.

Facebook says that all these features make conversation on the portal more natural than standard video calls, but I do not think it goes that far. A video call is always a video call, and although the use of the video call portal is certainly more comfortable than a phone or other intelligent display device, it does not feel like other people online are actually in the room and go out with me.

The portal has other features designed to bring the two parties closer together. It can stream music from Spotify (provided you have a Premium account) and you can play a song during a video call that both parties can hear, with individual volume controls. Unfortunately, this only works for portal portal calls and not when you use the portal to call someone with a phone.

The portal supports Messenger's augmented reality masks, which are limited in number but fun to use. Finally, the AR mode of the story includes some children's stories and lets you play animations, sound effects and music. It's something I could see seeing parents who travel a lot use to call home and read a bedtime story with their kids, but it only works if you call of a portal, not from a mobile device, making this case of use unlikely.

Apart from video calls, portal features are rather limited. It can display images from your Facebook account when it's not being used actively. It can stream music from Spotify, Pandora or iHeartRadio. It can stream video from a very limited number of sources, including Facebook's blurry surveillance service, Newsy's short film series and Food Network, which features a multitude of Tasty Knockoff videos in a square format that does not fill the screen. There is also a very rudimentary experience on YouTube, which is an awkward browser view of the YouTube smart TV app that's hard to navigate and can not work with voice commands.

The portal does not contain Netflix, HBO, Hulu, YouTube TV, Amazon Prime Video or any other video service you can think of. You can not stream content from your phone to this phone, or a web browser to search for recipes or other information. In a hilarious way, you can not even browse your Facebook news feed. Facebook says it plans to bring more video content to the portal in the future, but at launch, it is terribly ill-equipped.

Facebook has built some rudimentary voice commands, so you can say "Hey Portal" to make a call or adjust the volume. But you also have the option of using Alexa. The portal becomes the largest Echo loudspeaker ever created. Some skills in Alexa, such as weather, will use the display, but the Alexa version of the portal is not as rich and feature-rich as what you get on Echo Show.

All of these limitations make it very difficult for the portal to justify its place in your home. It's a big device that basically does two things: make calls on Facebook and play Spotify. It's not a lot of functionality for something that takes up a lot of space on a shelf or countertop and that takes up a precious power outlet all the time.

But the biggest problem most people will have with the portal is that it's a device that always looks and listens. connected to Facebook. The release of the device would have been delayed several months following the scandal Cambridge Analytica, in which Facebook would have been pilloried for not having established a strict control of data shared with third-party developers. And while Facebook was preparing for the release of the device, the company revealed that a new data breach had compromised the accounts of more than 50 million people.

Rafa Camargo, vice president of Facebook, responsible for portal development, said the company was aware of privacy concerns early in the development of the product. He says that the company can not listen to Facebook Messenger calls because they are encrypted and that the portal only broadcasts audio and video over the Internet when you are in communication.

A Disable button at the top of the device disables the camera and microphone features. Facebook also includes a small plastic cover allowing the camera to block it when you do not use it. The device does not record or store your conversations (all video chats are streamed live) and its Smart Camera feature that identifies topics in a call runs locally on the portal and does not use the detection features Face of Facebook.

Facebook says all the good things about privacy, but I'm not sure that will be enough to convince skeptics. There are already mixed messages from Facebook about whether or not it will be able to use the portal's data for advertising purposes. People are right to be skeptical.

Beyond that, unless you use Messenger's Facebook calls a lot, the portal is not enough to justify its existence.

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