Facebook Portal Plus - Smart Video Calling 15.6” Touch Screen Display with Alexa - Black

Facebook engineers did an awesome job with the development and functionality of the Facebook Portal+. The Portal+ is a great option for anyone in the business environment trying to collaborate with a distributed team or just trying to communicate with family and friends through WhatsApp. You will love the Smart Camera! The Portal+ comes in handy specially during the Coronavirus pandemic. Everyone should get one of these units.

Love that it has a big screen. Best part of all its features is that as I walk around the room camera follows me. I plan to buy a second one for kitchen later.

Works really well for chatting with parents and friends that are far away (esp. during a pandemic it turns out). Auto tracking works well, audio is good during video chats. Using it for listening to music is adequate. Definitely wouldnt consider sound quality for music amazing but is pretty good.

First, I think this is a great idea and an exciting product A simple, turnkey piece of hardware for doing Facetime with some great features. The problem is, its a product by Facebook who is only really known for their social media application, not for specialized hardware devices. And theres a world of difference between those two worlds. As applications go social media applications are not terribly demanding nor highly sophisticated programs compared to many other applications. Especially when theyre written in such a way as to function in the browser world. Specialized hardware applications, on the other hand, must take into account not only the dedicated application that runs on it, but also the hardware and device interfaces that allow it to connect the the outside world. This is the stuff that can become very tricky when trying to make those complex hardware interactions appear to be very simple and bulletproof. Given how easily this type of thing has become in these day of WiFi connected smartphones, computers, laptops, and streaming devices its easy to overlook that complexity unless youve been in the hardware world for a while. And this is where this device fails. Right out of the box when this device fires up it presents the user with a list of available WiFi connections. You select the one you want and youre asked to enter your password for that network. It sounds simple, but if it fails you dont get much information about why it failed, so troubleshooting it is a problem. The device doesnt come with any information about where to call for support, so unless you know how to do a Google search and find the support site, youre stuck. Once you get in touch with the support line they run you through some very simplistic troubleshooting steps such as a reset of the device and power cycling your WiFi router (which affects anyone or anything else that happens to be using that router at the time). After those few simple steps it gets beyond what the first level of support can provide and they escalate it to the more advanced support group who, in my case, simply emailed me to send it back to Amazon and get a replacement. Given this experience I determined they really werent ready to be operating in todays more sophisticated hardware environment quite yet and simply sent it back for a refund. The device came with very little in the way of documentation of support information. If youre trying to make it appear to be simple, then it must be bulletproof. Otherwise, its just frustrating and not worth the time. Especially for the price theyre asking for it.

It’s amazing, but sucks that it has to stay plugged in! Would make such a difference if it was a little more portable. The zooming & tracking technology is an awesome addition to video chatting

At the time, it was a good low price. Unit does have some bugs in it. Need to reboot at times. It does alot of stuff more than when it first came out which is good! I think further upgrades are no longer since this 1st generation is now discontinued. Good picture quality and size. I like the option for portrait and landscape viewing.

Does require reasonable upload speed in order for picture quality to be good (say 5MB+ or so). If you or the other user has DSL, picture quality will be bad.

Got this in lieu of the Echo Show because of the bigger screen. For our intended purpose, it was the right move. Ability to sign and chat withn or drag daughter. The larger screen was key here. The level of integration with Alexa isnt what we hoped for (cannot listen to Amazon Prime Music, or we havent figured that ot yet). Im glad we still have our echo devices throughout the house... This was a nice device to compliment what we have. Still need to look into getting an show for the missing/ desired Alexa features.

The portal was recommended by a friend. I have regular conversations with friends that are far away, and the portal makes it seem like you are together chatting in your living room- or cooking together for that matter. The camera on the screen moves with you! I would highly recommend this for those who are having regular video conferencing with family, friend or work. Its like being there. You must have a FaceBook messenger account, but those you call dont have to have the machine. I havent connected to Alexa so cant rate that feature.

My husband & I really love it! There are many things you can do with it.