Review: HTC First With Facebook Home

The HTC First is the device Facebook has chosen as the launchpad for its new mobile software experience, Facebook Home.

But forget the phone. It barely matters. It's slim, simple and low-profile, a middling device designed to fade into the background and bring one thing, and one thing only, to the forefront: Facebook.

Facebook Home is the social networking giant's Android takeover, or apperating system, as we're calling it. I've been using it since it was unveiled last week, and I can tell you, it's off to a promising start. Surprisingly, Facebook Home doesn't bash you over the head with the "Facebook product." Rather, it elegantly integrates with the Android operating system. You still get access to all of your standard Android apps like Chrome, Maps, Play Store, and Spotify. If anything, Home could benefit from more integration with the broader Android platform as it continues to grow.

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A little about what Facebook Home is, exactly. It's a software interface created by Facebook that changes the look and feel of the Android OS. It comes pre-installed on the HTC First, which sells for $100 with an AT&T contract, and you can also download it for free from Google Play starting Friday, April 12. It only runs on select Android devices for now – besides this phone, it will install on Samsung's Galaxy S III and Note II, and HTC's One X and One X+. It doesn't replace Android, it merely augments it by using Facebook's services to power the key social interactions you perform on the phone – browsing social media updates, chatting with somebody, sharing a picture, and sharing links.

To that end, it is a success. For people who spend a lot of time on Facebook and want to stay connected to their Facebook friends, Facebook Home makes absolute sense. There's little reason not to get Facebook Home if you already have a compatible Android device. And even if, like myself, you don't spend tons of time on the social networking site, Facebook Home adds value to the Android experience without feeling invasive.

The core of the Facebook Home experience is Cover Feed, a constantly refreshing visual display of your Facebook News Feed. It serves as your lock screen and your home screen. And it's not shy – each individual update takes up your entire screen, showing large imagery and text, along with the profile thumbnail photo of the friend who posted the update. You can just stare at your lock screen as it slowly scrolls through updates, or you can take a more active role and start swiping through updates, Flipboard-style, which is also the same mechanism that unlocks the phone.

It's a highly immersive experience, and to create it, Facebook Home's designers actively diverged from the traditional, vertically organized mobile News Feed in Facebook's Android and iOS apps. ("If you give each story its own space to live, it makes you appreciate the content a little more," Facebook product designer Joey Flynn explained to me.) And in a lot of ways, Cover Feed is a better way to browse your updates. Swiping through full-screen photos is more tactile than scrolling through a long list of updates. Also, you can tap and hold a post to get a zoomed-out view of the image. You can double-tap to "like" something (borrowed from Instagram) and tap on the comments icon to see all the interactions with a post, all without leaving Cover Feed. Facebook wants you consuming and interacting with your friends' photos and posts as much as possible, so that's where Home is centered. It works: I found myself double-tapping to like posts a lot more often in Cover Feed than I'm used to on the desktop or inside the Facebook iOS app.

The most impressive feature that comes with Facebook Home, however, has nothing to do with updates from the News Feed. It's the centralized messaging system, Chat Heads. It's a weird name, but it's a fantastic, multitasking, mobile chat application.

A chat comes in either over SMS or Facebook Messenger. Instead of you having to switch to a messaging app, a little circular icon showing your friends' face floats on top of your home screen, or whatever app you're currently running. Just tap that Chat Head to continue the conversation, or swipe it downwards to forget about it. Once you're in the messaging interface, you can have multiple Chat Heads at the top, and they remain there as long as you want to continue a conversation. It's the one feature of Home I most want to see ported to other mobile operating systems.

That said, Facebook Home still needs a whole lot more polish and growth. The Chat Heads feature works well if you're messaging with Facebook friends. But when you sync your contacts from Facebook, it doesn't recognize when one of your Facebook friends has text messaged you. Instead, a bland "SMS" Chat Head pops up, even if you have that person's number in your contacts. It's a bug Facebook will surely fix in a future update (the company has committed to monthly updates, and since Home runs as an app on top of Android, it can be updated independently of the OS) but is also indicative of Facebook Home's infancy.

As Facebook rolls out more updates, it will need to integrate more with the Android platform. For example, Facebook Home doesn't currently have the capability to sync Facebook photos into the Gallery app or Facebook events to your Calendar. When you tap and hold a photo in Cover Feed, you can't rotate your phone to view it horizontally. If you want to see somebody's Timeline, you have to jump into the main Facebook app – a jarring experience, since Home and the Facebook app use differing design languages. There's also no way to jump from a specific post in Cover Feed to that same post in the app.

Many of these features are already available on another mobile operating system: Windows Phone 8, where Facebook is also deeply integrated. On current Windows Phones, your Facebook photos appear in your gallery, and you can view your Facebook events in the main WP8 calendar app. Contacts sync seamlessly. Overall, that's a good thing for Facebook. "We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into 'Facebook phones,'" Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Wired recently. But Facebook Home does need to play a bit of catch-up. It seems only inevitable that Home will continue to push further and further into Android until it reaches a point where it's more integrated into Google's mobile OS than Microsoft's. And since we're expecting monthly updates to Home, all of these missing elements are more than likely already on Facebook's to-do list.

As for the hardware, Facebook says it is already working with phone manufacturers and carriers to build more handsets that come pre-installed with Facebook Home. If the HTC First is any indication, these phones will be competent and affordable mid-range devices. The First is about what you'd expect for a $100 handset. It has a 4.3-inch screen with a 1280x720 resolution, a 1.4GHz dual core processor and 16GB of storage. There's a 5-megapixel camera in back and a 1.3-megapixel eye in front. It's an AT&T phone with LTE support, and it's running Android version 4.1. The First also has a relatively large 2000mAh battery – the hardware has been optimized for the animation-heavy software, so you don't have to worry about battery life on this phone. In my tests, I subjected the HTC First to continuous image-heavy Facebook Home updates and refreshes, and the First's battery lasted longer than my iPhone 5, which has a 1440 mAh battery. Results may vary if you install Home on your Galaxy S III.

And if you're worried about data usage, Facebook Home has a "Data Use and Image Quality" setting to let you control how often posts refresh in Cover Feed. You can throttle your data consumption by setting the update frequency to high, medium or low. It's a thoughtful addition, considering how costly data overages are.

Facebook assured Wired that Facebook Home does not track your location data – unless, that is, you have opted in to allowing such behavior by turning on locations services in the Messenger app, or by using the Check-in functionality. In that case, it collects your data using the same methods as Facebook's stand-alone Android applications.

But Facebook's history of sticky and unpredictable privacy term changes introduces the possibility that this won't stay true for long, especially if advertising is introduced into Facebook Home. Right now, Facebook Home does not have any ads (yay) but Zuckerberg did say that we might see ads in Cover Feed in the future. This comes as no surprise – the mobile app and desktop versions of the News Feed prominently feature ads. And what's better than a full-screen, color ad pushed directly to a person's home screen? When that day comes, Facebook Home will definitely become a whole different ball of wax. Will it start using your current location to serve you relevant ads for nearby deals? That's a possibility worth considering before buying this phone, or installing Home on your own device.

In its current state, Facebook Home is a bright beginning. It makes absolute sense for people who want to stay connected to Facebook, or those who use Facebook as a frequent messaging system. It doesn't completely invade your standard Android operating system. It's free and, for now at least, it's ad-free. Need a break? You can always turn it off (there's an option in Settings).

It's nice to see that after so many failed attempts, Facebook has finally cracked the mobile software riddle. Here's to hoping it doesn't screw it up.

WIRED Chat Heads rule – an innovative interface that makes messaging a truly multitasking experience. Full-screen Cover Feed images are pretty and won't drain battery or data. Simple integration of a complicated web service that doesn't take away from Android's strengths. Tactile navigation is smooth and sensible. An easy way to spend more time on Facebook.

TIRED Still has bugs that need working out; syncing contacts, for example. No photo or events integration option. You still need to jump in and out of Cover Feed to the main Facebook app to see people profiles. Could start to suck once ads creep in. An easy way to spend more time on Facebook.