Facebook Home Now Available in Google Play Store

[mmadhankumar]

Facebook Home, the social network's new more-than-just-an-app, which turns select smartphones into almost Facebook phones, is now available in the Google Play store for free download.

Facebook Home, revealed earlier this month, was made available Friday for owners of the HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III, and Samsung Galaxy Note II. The new $99.99 HTC First smartphone, also released Friday, comes preloaded with Facebook Home, while the interface will be made available for the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 at a future date, Facebook said.

Owners of other Android phones will have to wait until Facebook releases Home for their phones. Tablets running Google's mobile operating system will also get access to Facebook Home at some point, the company said.

The best news for early adopters? Facebook Home doesn't have ads and won't for at least several months, according to the company.
The Home "experience," as the company bills it, comes up short of turning a handset into the full-fledged "Facebook phone" some people anticipated was being developed ahead of Facebook Home's unveiling. It's not a new mobile operating system or even a fork of Android, but it's also quite a bit more than another innocuous button to add to your phone's app launcher.


What it does is serve up Facebook, and lots of it, to devices from the moment they're turned on. Facebook Home first and foremost lives on a phone's lockscreen, delivering a stripped-down, tailored version of a user's News Feed, complete with alerts and the ability to comment on and like items as they dribble in across the touch screen.

Beyond that, Facebook has also repurposed the basic Android app launcher from the ground up, and Home also includes a messaging management system called Chat Heads.



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