![]() ![]() If privacy is your big concern here, well, tbh, it’s pretty good. And if you’re someone who doesn’t have a Facebook account, you can now log in and use it completely through WhatsApp. Let me assuage the standard fears you may have: Facebook isn’t spying on you through the camera, it’s not stealing your face, it’s not listening to you while it’s off (it does have voice control, but you can turn this off). Here’s the part where I have to put in the disclaimer about how you, a person who reads the news and is interested in technology and has some opinions probably about Facebook, may be somewhat skeptical about buying a Portal. Making these devices more work-friendly has a positive side effect for Facebook: You might not want to plunk down $349 on a Portal+, but your company might buy it for you. It also allows your company’s IT department to control your device in the way that it would a company laptop, including being able to remotely wipe the device if it is lost or stolen. This allows employees to log in to Portal not with their personal Facebook accounts but with a dedicated Facebook for Work account (this feature is currently being tested with a few companies and will expand in 2022). The most intriguing sign that Facebook is serious about making the Portal a remote work device is a new service called Portal for Business. This isn’t by default, however, you have to opt into it for the call, which is how it currently works on the regular Messenger app for your phone. One other added feature is the option to use end-to-end encryption for Portal calls made through Facebook Messenger (calls made through WhatsApp were already end-to-end encrypted). Portal also has WebEx and GoToMeeting, and is finally adding Microsoft Teams (starting in December). Now, you can just tap into a Zoom link from the calendar on the homescreen instead of manually typing in the meeting ID. It adds some much-needed features, like more widgets on your homescreen, especially a very useful calendar. ![]() There’s also an update to the software for the Portal homescreen. “We started to be guided more and more by two use cases: connecting with family and friends, and then being successful in your home office.” “Very early in the pandemic, we realized, Oh, this is a tool we should be doing more development on,” Bosworth said. It’s a less bulky and more sleek design than the older Portal+, which had a screen that could rotate to go vertical for portrait style (Bosworth said they noticed most people kept it in landscape the majority of the time). The Portal+’s screen tilts to adjust and is meant to sit on a desktop. “It’s adding to the existing tool kit that the average person has trying to work remotely,” said Andrew Bosworth, VP of Reality Labs at Facebook. The latest model of the Portal+, with a larger screen, is designed in the hopes that you (or your boss) will use it for all those work video calls you’ve been doing over your shitty laptop for the last year and a half. Now with vaccinated grandparents cautiously visiting family, Facebook wants the Portal to shift focus its gaze on a new target: your job. Grandparents across the globe were itching to pinch little cheeks, but those same grandparents were the most vulnerable to COVID-19, so distance was kept. The perfect use case is Grandma and Grandpa using it to video-chat with the grandkids (if you have ever seen two boomers try to cram both faces into one phone for FaceTime, you get it). The Portal has a smart camera that can follow you around the room with a wide-angle lens, which means that unlike with laptops or iPads, it’s easy for two people to fit onscreen together. Way back in April 2020, when we were first locking down, I wrote that the Facebook Portal was the perfect gadget for the pandemic. ![]()
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