If you’ve been waiting to try out Facebook’s new people-oriented approach to smartphones, today is your lucky day. Facebook Home is now officially available to download and install on your Android phone.
Facebook Home is a truly new approach to the Android user experience. The design replaces your lock screen, home screen, and app drawer with a focus on your social self instead of your task-oriented self. Our current mobile workflows exist in between a series of apps that may or may not work together, and every category of task is treated the same. Facebook Home places a premium on receiving and interacting with social content, and obviously it makes sure that content comes from your Facebook account.
If you’re accustomed to the task-oriented style of Android, or if you’re not a dedicated Facebook user, this service is not for you. Facebook Home is ideal for someone who has already moved most of their communication to Facebook. If you’re big on Facebook chat and messaging, with very little use for other IM services, Facebook Home’s Chat Heads will be an ideal addition to your smartphone. The app service focuses around Facebook, but still gives you access to all of your existing Android apps when you need them.
Of course, if you’d rather take advantage of just parts of this experience, Facebook has made that pretty easy. Chat Heads, for example, has been rolled into Facebook Messenger, and can be used as a separate app entirely. Just install the messenger app, and the service will work once you’re logged in to Facebook. Chat Heads takes your incoming messages and floats them above everything else you are doing at the time, so you can quickly just back and forth between your task and your conversation without leaving the app you are in.
Trying out Facebook Home is easy, especially if you already have Facebook installed and updated. The app will download two additional services to be installed on your phone. Once these are installed, you’ll be given the option between Facebook Home and your existing home screen when you press the home button on your phone. You can choose Facebook Home, and you can select to either use this option just once or always. Facebook Home will start immediately after this setting is made.
Facebook Home is available on the HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S3, and Samsung Galaxy Note 2 starting today, with plans to be available soon for the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4. The earlyleaked build of Facebook Home, which had been made available for the LG Nexus 4 and Nexus 7, are no longer functional. It’s possible that new builds for phones that are not officially supported by Facebook will be made available over the next couple of weeks, but for now the only way to get it is from the official source.
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