If you've opened any app with ads or turned on the telly, you've likely seen the adverts for Facebook Portal.
Fucking hell. They're all over the telly. Just what we need, another thing locking us into Facebook and it's walled garden.
For $149, you can get the shitty little 10.1" display. Then you can call your annoying fucking relatives and have to keep whatever room they're in clean as fuck so they don't complain and shit on you. Of course, you'll likely want the far cooler 15.6" display, with the vertical display. Both of them mean all you can fucking do with it is call people on Facebook and use Alexa. Fucking everything these days uses Alexa.
It's also got some kinda weather display and Spotify, which is a little nice, but you can do better on any Android tablet. Hell, they're only 720p. You can do better than that on cheap fucking tablets these days.
But you're not buying it for a great display, are you? You probably aren't buying it for fuckin Spotify either. You're buying it because of that fancy fucking camera tech that follows you and calling your bloody fuckin relatives.
Yeah, if you really wanted to call them, you could Skype them or call them on the bloody fucking phone. Hell, you've been able to video call them in all sorts of ways before. Did you? Why do you need a specialty device for it that can't do shit but what Facebook tells you you're allowed to.
Truth be told, for being a locked down piece of shit, it doesn't look half bad. It's even got a button to turn off the cam and a cover for the cam included. The "smart camera" following you around and shit is pretty fucking cool. Though it is a bit creepy as well. It also apparently has some microphone enhancements to minimize background noise. Dunno how good that is though. It also has dorky little AR effects that they advertise for telling stories for the kids. Kinda like a "filter" in an app.
Woulda been a lot better if they just put fucking Android on it. But they probably couldn't. Probably would have had to upgrade it a bit. Couldn't cheap out quite enough if they put Android on it. People would notice it's a piece of shit.
There's another huge problem with them putting their own little shit operating system on it. You got the same problems as with all the internet connected devices. It's probably not secure and eventually it will be abandoned.
But I'm looking forward to it being hacked. I hope they didn't lock it down too much. It's probably just some Linux variant with a cheap front end. Of course, when you use a old ass version of Linux and don't secure it properly, it's less secure than Windows.
Hopefully it doesn't become a Portal to your part of the botnet.
I do think it's a good thing though. Portal's a locked down piece of shit, but with how much they're pushing it, it means that pretty soon you'll see other, more open devices, likely using Android, that can do similar shit with a camera, following you around the room and other such creepy shit. Also might cause more people to put switches on the cams on other device, so the NSA can't watch us shagging on the kitchen table.
I gotta hand it to them, some of their commercials are funny a bit.
But they should have just made it a bit more of an open device and not been such right bloody twats.