Facebook Home On Your Phone
Last month Facebook introduced Facebook Home, a way to turn your Android phone into a supposed great, living, social phone.
Since today’s phones are built around tasks and apps, you’ll typically pull your phone out and navigate through these separately.
Home offers you a new experience that lets you see the world through people, not apps.
It is not an operating system, but it practically acts like one.
From within Home, the two major features are Cover Feed and Chat Heads.
Cover Feed replaces your phone’s lock screen and home screen, so the content comes right to you. It’s a window that shows you the happenings of your friends and family.
Further, Chat Heads keeps you chatting with your friends even when you’re using other apps. When they send you messages, a Chat Head appears with your friend’s face, so you see exactly whom you’re chatting with.
You can move the heads around to respond to messages. Since SMS is integrated into Facebook Messenger for Android, Chat Heads includes Facebook messages as well as texts.
As far as receiving notifications and accessing your apps, you’ll receive notifications with your friends’ profile picture that you just tap to open. If you don’t want to deal with it at the moment it pops up, then swipe to hide them.
Your apps can be accessed by swiping up to see your favorite apps in the launcher.
There also is a screen containing all of your apps, and you can move your faves to the launcher from there.
Facebook Home is a great concept, especially if you’re a Facebook junkie, but the huge drawback is that there are no widgets or app folders. I would imagine because of all the complaints regarding this, Facebook will do an update and look for a way to integrate your phone’s existing folders and widgets from within Home.
If you’re willing to give it a try, download it for free from the Google Play Store.
In addition, HTC and AT&T are the first companies working together to offer the HTC First phone, which is pre-installed with Facebook Home.
Other recent phones to note Facebook Home will work well on: HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung GALAXY S III and Samsung GALAXY Note II, HTC One and Samsung GALAXY S4.
Click Chick’s Mobile
App of the Week: TWC TV
If you’ve been using Time Warner Cable’s app on your iOS device, you know that it recently added the ability to stream your TV shows outside your home network (previously, you could only enjoy this feature inside your home). This week the feature has been updated for Android devices, as well.
This refresh will give your Android device access to more than 4,000 on-demand shows and movies, as well as live TV streaming to the 200-plus live channels you can watch in your home.
The TWC TV is available at no additional cost to existing Time Warner Cable Video subscribers. Find it for free on the Play Store (or iTunes App Store).
