Facebook has unveiled a brand new product today it calls “Home” and it’s available on Android devices.At an anticipated event at its Menlo Park headquarters, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the phone was arriving it would be used to help users can turn their Android phone to a great social phone. The idea is to make the world more open and connected — which matches it’s mission statement.
Today it’s all about Android
Zuckerberg says that it’s great because it’s open and that you don’t need to fork it to handle the integrations. He says that there’s a new category of experiences — the home screen of your phone. It’s the soul of your phone and sets the tone of your whole experience.
With this new experience, there’s a family of apps called “Home” — it has no swipes or gestures to view content, enabling you to flip through stories, tap on content to Like it, and more. All the interactions are “smooth” with the feel of system software, not just another app.
Instead of a phone designed around apps first, the system was designed around people first and you could interact around people? According to Zuckerberg, it would feel different — rightly so. The use case whereby users have their phones with them all the time, users want to bring all the content to the front and use apps whenever they want to.
Before News Feed, users needed to click through a bunch of apps. With the introduction of News Feed, users had a home screen that came alive and “had a soul” and Zuckerberg felt it was a great way to consume content. Now the company wants to bring the feeling of home right to the phone and deliver it to as many people as possible. The company wants to build the best experience for everyone on every phone.
From rumor to truth
The announcement of a new mobile platform comes after much rumor and speculation. The news from the social networking company comes a week after it released word to the press about it’s “new home” on Android. Since that time, many people have been discussing what Facebook would be revealing. Some supposedly leaked photos of the device have also appeared on the Internet with Gizmodo saying that phone manufacturer HTC will be developing the first “Facebook phone”. It’s also believed that the name of the phone will be the HTC First.
More mobile users
With this new mobile tool in its arsenal, Facebook could be in a position to capture more attention by its users on mobile devices. In Q4 2012, the company announced that it for the first time, it had more users accessing its service from mobile than desktop. Zuckerberg has even said that more money is earned from mobile where its users have a 70 percent likelihood of using it.
Zuckerberg phone denial
Today’s announcement is a bit of a reversal for Facebook. Last January, Zuckerberg denied that the company was in the process of building out a phone. The rumors recently picked up prior to the company’s announcement of its Graph Search product. But if you look back at what the Facebook CEO said on the company’s Q4 2013 earnings, he denied that a phone was in its game plan.
We’re not going to build a phone. It’s not the right strategy for us to build one integrated system…Let’s say we sell 10 million units — that would be 1 percent of users. Who cares for us?
This wasn’t the first time that Zuckerberg has denied that Facebook would ever build a phone — last September at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, he said publicly that going the phone route would be the “wrong strategy” for the company.
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Article source: TNW http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheNextWeb/~3/Wj-_uAz4ko0/