Last week on April 4, at Facebook headquarter Mark Zuckerberg officially announced Facebook Home, a free software that users can install on their Android devices to essentially “Facebook-ize” their phones. But software giant Microsoft has said that Facebook Home is a “copycat” and Windows Phone is the “real thing.”
The idea behind Facebook Home is to make connecting with your friends and loved ones the primary focus of your mobile phone. Instead of showing you a static picture when your phone is “locked,” Facebook Home shows you the latest updates from your friends. You can quickly swipe through updates and reply to them without having to open a separate app.
Facebook Home also completely takes over your messaging, seamlessly weaving together text messages and Facebook messages so that you never have to care how you’re communicating – you’re just constantly connected. You can continue chatting regardless of whether you’re using other apps on your phone. The messages will pop-up as small “bubbles” above whatever you’re doing – watching a video or surfing the web – until you reply or dismiss them.
In fact, Facebook Home completely changes the emphasis of any phone on which it’s installed. Android phones traditionally have the Google Search bar at the top of the home screen. Facebook Home does away with the bar completely, making searching into a three step process.
Facebook has announced that it will launch Facebook Home on April 12 and it will be initially available on HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III and Samsung Galaxy Note II, with more devices set to be added having Ice Cream Sandwich operating system or higher to the line-up.
Facebook said, “We designed Home to be the next version of Facebook. But we also wanted to do something more. We wanted to reimagine the way we all use computing devices to make us more connected and bring us closer to the people we care about.” In fact, Zuckerberg calls the Home screen “the soul of your phone.”
But interestingly software giant Microsoft is not happy with Facebook Home. According to Frank X. Shaw, corporate vice president of corporate communications at Microsoft, “The content of the (Facebook) presentation was remarkably similar to the launch event we did for Windows Phone two years ago.”
Later he wrote in a blog post that Facebook Home is a “copycat” and Windows Phone is the “real thing.”
Source: ITProPortal
[ttjad keyword=”wp-7″]
I guess they must be worried, if they’re releasing a nothing statement like this…
You can almost feel sorry for Microsoft, because at the executive level, there seems to be nobody left with an IQ over 80