Facebook Home showed up on the Play Store today, which means the HTC First is also sitting in AT&T stores right now for $99.99 on a two year contract. I am not buying a phone just to get a launcher, so I downloaded Home straight onto my Galaxy S III over lunch instead. Two hours later it was gone. Let me back up.
If you havent been following this, Facebook unveiled Home at their campus event last week, the one where Zuckerberg kept insisting "we are not building a phone, we are building a home," which is the kind of line that sounds clever in a keynote and slightly unhinged when you type it out afterward. Home isnt an app so much as a replacement for your entire launcher. It takes over your lock screen and home screen with what they call Cover Feed, which is just your Facebook feed blown up full screen with giant photos cycling underneath the clock. Text messages and Facebook chats show up as little round profile picture bubbles that float on top of whatever else youre doing, they call these Chat Heads, and you tap them to pop a conversation open without leaving your current app.
Setting it up was easy enough, which I will give them credit for. Install, grant it a scary number of permissions, tell it to be your default home app, done. The Cover Feed part is genuinely pretty, Ill admit that much. Big photos, clean typography, it does not look like something designed by committee.
Then you actually try to use your phone.
My biggest problem: theres no fast way to get to your app drawer. You swipe up on your own little circular profile photo (Facebook calls this the "App Launcher" icon, very creative) and it opens a grid, but its slower than just having icons sitting on a home screen like every launcher since 2008. I use my phone for a hundred things that arent Facebook. Camera, Spotify, the actual text messaging app, my banking app. All of that got shoved a layer deeper so that my aunts vacation photos could autoplay across my lock screen. Chat Heads sound cute in a demo and are genuinely annoying by hour two, theres a green bubble sitting over my email while Im trying to read it and I cant find where to make it stop without digging into settings.
Battery is the other thing nobody mentions in the launch coverage. My phone was noticeably warmer by early afternoon and the battery percentage was dropping faster than a normal day of texting and browsing should account for. Could be a first-day bug, could just be the cost of a home screen that never stops rendering a live feed. Either way I dont have patience for it on a phone Im also using for actual work.
The HTC First itself, from what Ive read, is basically a mid-range Android phone with Home baked in and no way to fully remove it as your default. It comes in four colors with names that feel like they were picked by the same team that names paint chips, theres one called "Farmers Market" that is somehow a shade of pale yellow. I dont know who signed off on that in a meeting. $99.99 with a contract is a fine price for a phone this spec level, Im just not convinced the software on top of it is the selling point they think it is.
I uninstalled Home around 2pm and went back to my regular launcher, which on this phone is just the stock TouchWiz one because Ive been too lazy to put Nova back on since I flashed a new ROM last month. Somewhere in a drawer I still have my old Nokia N900 and every so often I plug it in just to remember what a phone felt like before every company decided the home screen was the last piece of real estate worth fighting over. Facebook wants that real estate more than anyone right now, I just dont think Im the customer theyre after. Maybe if my whole social life ran through the app it would click differently. Mine mostly runs through group texts and one very active email thread with people I went to college with, so Cover Feed just isnt doing much for me.
Curious if anyone reading this actually picked up a First today. If youre still carrying it around next week Id like to hear how the battery situation looks after the first update rolls through.