Facebook Home Is Coming April 12th

By Nathan Young on April 4, 2013

The rumors of a Facebook phone was somewhat true. Today, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook announced that the Facebook Home app and the HTC First smart phone is coming out on April 12th. The phone will come pre-loaded with Facebook Home, which is the new software for Android phones and will cost $99. This software is basically a collection of apps which will deliver a full Facebook experience. All of your Facebook contacts, photos, status updates, and chat icons will be featured on the front screen and will be easy to use. The phone will also come with Instagram pre-loaded. Some of the features of this phone includes:

4.3-inch glass display
Runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean with the new Facebook Home experience
Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor with a dual-core CPU
Runs off AT&T’s 4G LTE

Facebook Home will run off of the HTC First and will also work on the HTC One, One X, and One X+, and the Samsung Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4, and Galaxy Note 2. Facebook Home will also be available in the Google Play store for download. One good thing about it being an app is you can disable and tweak certain settings and permissions. And soon you can bet Facebook Home will be available for all smart phones and will replace the current Facebook app. Sorry Apple users, your wait is going to be longer! Here is a video from Forbes demonstrating Facebook Home.

Once the phone is turned on, the home screen and lock screen are replaced with something called Cover Feed. Images and posts from friends will appear as the new screen’s background. Users can flip through and interact with them, “like” an update, or post a comment, immediately without having to open a specific Facebook app. One touch takes the user to their apps, or back to the last app they were using. Another feature is called Chat Heads, which is basically a tool that combines Facebook Messenger with the phone’s regular SMS text-message tool. Messages pop up regardless of what the user is doing at the time, along with the sender’s profile picture, enclosed in a little circle.

Facebook is doing something here very smart in my opinion. Your entire front screen will be like the Facebook you use on the computer but only better! Depending on the success of Facebook Home, you will see Twitter, Google +, and other apps do something similar And that my friends will be awesome!