Saying that a phone should be designed around "people first," Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg formally announced a new Facebook-centric smartphone experience entitled "Facebook Home" at a press event in San Francisco Thursday, as well as a new handset from HTC named the HTC First.
The phone experience centers on the lock screen, which Zuckerberg said is the same as the home screen. The lock screen experience is named “cover feed,” and can be navigated via swipes and taps. Swiping up from the cover feed produced an app launcher that allows users to access the rest of their apps.
Cover feed allows users to browse photos, double-tap to like something, or leave a comment without ever unlocking the phone. Zuckerberg asserted that the phone is designed around "people, not apps." The interface bears many similarities to the stock Android UI.
In addition to the lock screen experience, Facebook Home includes a feature called "chat heads," a messaging interface that uses chat partners' faces as tabs for their messaging windows. When a user is in any app, a “chat head” can appear off to the side of the screen. Users tap the icon to enter the conversation, and then swipe upward to take the messaging interface off the screen and return to the app they were in before. Both SMS and Facebook messages can utilize the "chat head" alert.
Facebook Home can be downloaded from the Google Play store. When it is first launched, Facebook cautions that Android makes certain the user "really" wants to use it as the default interface and the user can try it before committing to it as the default. Tablets will not be a party to the initial launch, but Facebook says the interface will come to that form factor "months later."
Initially, only four smartphones will support Facebook Home: the HTC One, HTC One X/X+, Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung Galaxy S 4, and Samsung Galaxy Note II.Facebook stated explicitly that it is not forking Android or creating a Facebook operating system.
In addition to Facebook's new app suite, it is also launching a new phone named the HTC First that comes with the Facebook Home experience pre-installed. The phone will come in four colors (black, white, sky blue, and red), is priced at $99.99 with a two-year contract, and its only carrier partner will be AT&T. Pre-orders for the phone open today, and like the app experience, it will ship April 12.
A Facebook phone has been worked over by the rumor mill since 2010, and its existence had beeen denied by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Screenshots and mockups of an OS and phone body design leaked Wednesday.
Facebook’s press event is currently in progress, and Ars reporters are on the ground liveblogging it minute by minute. We will update this article as more details become available.
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