Facebook Portal TV!
Tanishq Kishnani
Facebook is coming up with a fresh product category that could give the social network a unique foothold in the living room. A new line of Portal devices bring to smaller smart screen form factors its auto-zooming AI camera, in-house voice assistant speaker, Alexa, apps like Spotify and newly added Amazon Prime Video, Messenger video chat and now end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp video calls.
The Product
The MVP here is the $149 Portal TV, turning most televisions with an HDMI connection into a video chat device. With the new Watch Together feature, you can co-watch videos along-with kith and kin living miles away; sitting in your own living room!
The Portal TV is a genius way for Facebook to make its hardware both cheaper yet more immersive by co-opting a screen you already own and have given a space in your life, thereby leapfrogging smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home.
Pricing
There’s the new pint-size 8-inch Portal Mini for just $129, which makes counter-top video chat exceedingly cheap. The 10-inch Portal that launched a year ago now has a sleeker, minimal bezel look with a price drop (from $199 to $179). Both look more like digital picture frames, which they are, and can be stood on their side or end for optimal full-screen chatting. Lastly, the giant 15.6-inch Portal+ swivel screen falls to $279 instead of $349, and you still get $50 off if you buy any two Portal devices.
The TV has been a staple of living rooms around the world, but to date, it’s been primarily about people who are physically interacting with the device. For a lot of families, it might be a better option to go for buying a Portal TV, since, for the price of a cheap ranged smartphone, it could serve as a more convenient and effective communications device.
Privacy Issues
With the recent row regarding the infringement of the user’s privacy and security standards, an attempt to bring inculcate Facebook’s technology deeper into the personal lives of people is futile without guaranteeing security to the users. Facebook tries to do it with integrated camera covers that are hardware, indicator lights when the microphone is off and form factors that are less obtrusive and blend more into the background of the home.
One major change stems from a scandal that spread across the tech sector, with Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook all being criticized for quietly sending voice clips to human reviewers to improve speech recognition in what felt like a privacy violation. Part of the experience is going to be a splash screen on data storage, and it will literally walk through how . . . when we hear ‘Hey Portal’ a voice recording and transcription is sent, it may be reviewed by humans, and people have the ability to opt-out.
