Facebook leans into Portal video chatting with three new devices

Hey you all, we are here getting a sneak peek at three new Portal devices from Facebook. There's the $179 Portal, the $149 Portal TV, and the $129 Portal Mini. So these are three new entirely redesigned devices. You'll recognize the Portal because There was a last gen model that had a slightly different design. But this one is newly redesigned and has a couple of really cool new features. And the portal TV actually goes over your TV so it doesn't use a built in screen, but harnesses your existing TV and it's supposed to be really easy to install. And then you have the portal mini which is a little bit smaller, only eight inch screen so you can still interact with people but it's not going to take up as much space. This is the 2nd Gen portal and it's 179 bucks. It'll be available in October. The main thing you can tell about this from the last Gen is a redesign. So it has the same 10 inch display screen. [CROSSTALK] But this one actually rotates between portrait and landscape mode. The idea being that if someone calls you on their mobile phone, and you want to optimize the image you can see of them, you can easily just move it from one to the other. They've also done a lot with built-in privacy features. So that's something that people really care about lately, and they want to make sure their cameras, their microphones, their speakers. Safe and secure. So what Facebook did with this model is actually build an integrated shutter so that you can actually just slide this over. It's really easy to do. And then you can immediately see the change. You can see it go from, there's the camera, the cameras gone. There's the camera, the cameras gone and at the same time A light appears that lets you know that the microphone is muted and that nothing is happening so you can't place a call. So that's a really nice new integrated feature that's going to be available on all these devices. Same as, same goes for the portal mini here, which is 129. The other thing Facebook has done is added some apps to its functionality. So they were a little limited before, they're still pretty limited, especially in terms of smartphone functionality, but they have added a few things. They're gonna add functionality so that you can say stream the image from your ring security camera and you can watch the live view. So if someone's at your front door, The live feed pops on you can actually see it on this device like you came with other smart display so that's a really nice thing they've also added functionality for whatsapp so people overseas really anyone who's using whatsapp can communicate with friends and family the same way they need and you Amazing a portal through Facebook messenger. So that adds a lot of new functionality for people that maybe don't have Facebook messenger, wanna use Whatsapp and communicate with friends and family, whether they're close of far away. I really like that addition cuz a lot of people use Whatsapp and it's a great app to have. One thing I'm not sure about with these updates, is that they actually made the field of view smaller. So the previous devices, the portal plus which is still sold for 279. And the first gen portal had 140 degree fields of view. These models have been bumped down to around 115 degrees field of view, which Is the significant drop from the originals, you won't get that same wide angle. The rational for this is that people tend to be pretty close over devices to interact with people so that it might not be a big deal, but one of the things I really loved about it was that wide angle. So that you could really walk from end of the. Room to the other. Maybe you're cooking a meal, maybe you're chasing after your kids, you can do those things and stay within the field of view. So that's something I'm gonna be interested to test when I get my hands on one of these things. So, Portal TV behind me is Facebook's attempt to bring its portal devices into your living room. Instead of just an eight-inch, ten-inch, or 15.6-inch screen, it's really Bringing it into a huge space so you can interact with people on a bigger level. Right? So the whole ethos behind these devices is video calling. It's interacting with people. It's having calls. It's doing story time through AR, it's playing games. It's all about being immersive You have a portal, they have a portal, but the TV puts it on a 55 inch to 65 inch screen and it makes it even easier to see what's happening. They also have a feature called Spotlight. This was available on previous portal devices, but it makes it possible so that if there are multiple people in a room, normally it would frame it around all those people. It's really smart. It does a great job. And I can also track them around the room. But if you wanna focus in on one person, one kid that's running around and You can actually just spotlight their face highlighted in a little square, and it'll follow them. The main takeaways are the portal TV, new form factor for Facebook. Also the WhatsApp integration beyond just Facebook Messenger and also the focus on privacy with the built in shutters, all those three things combined and make this a little more interesting to me but I'm not quite sold yet because a lot of stuff that I didn't like about the original device. The original portal is the same so we'll just have to see but for now, who knows the portal and the portal mini will be available on October 15. Portal TV will be available November 5 and the Facebook portal plus will go down from 349 to 279.