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

I bought this for my grandfather just as coronavirus started to become a real concern. I wanted him to be able to video chat with the family when we werent able to visit him. Unfortunately, his retirement community went on lockdown before I could deliver it. So until I can get it to him, we are using it in our home. I have a 5year old and a 16 month old. Video chatting with them via phone is hard for the people on the other end of the screen. They are ALL OVER THE PLACE and hard to follow. The portal has a nice wide field of vision that keeps them in frame most of the time However the BEST feature is the automatic face detection and camera tracking. It follows the girls all over our living room, keeping them in frame so their grandparents can always see them. It isnt 100% perfect, but it is a huge improvement over not having ng this feature and just trying to follow them with the phone. Surprised - I thought this was a pointless product, but now that I have one, it is the only way I want to video call Fwiw, the Alexa and FB assistant I tegratio s are nice, and the speakers are quite good quality (and powerful). We listen to Pandora, Amazon music, and lots more on here daily. I will probably buy one of these to replace it once I give this one to my grandfather. There are really great for connecting with family.

The video on zoom is great, but there is not an option to share screen when using zoom.

I bought this for my parents who are not tech savvy. The video and audio controls are right above the device handle, which makes them disable/enable audio and video inadvertently which is very annoying. The audio/video controls are tiny and won’t really give any tactile sense when operated, as mentioned by my parents

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.

Sometimes the voice recognition algorithm thinks it should turn on the device and a picture appears. It shuts off nicely when asked to however. The system works great with our family in Washington DC. They have one too, and we love the fact that the camera behaves well in all types of light and can follow and zoom to keep us in frame. Great product!

Excellent, we love our Portal plus. The camera is sharp and the sound is great. I use it for meetings and calling family and friends. The packaging is excellent, it protected the portal so well and very sleek design. it came with no damage at all. I highly recommend this product

I’m so confused and annoyed! I purchased this and was so excited to try it out. I’ve had the Original Echo Show since it’s been out and I’ve loved it! It’s been acting slow and out of date recently and so I wanted to update to something new and I was going between the Echo Show 10 or the Portal Plus and I decided on the portal plus because I loved the bigger display screen. I get it and I’m in love with it until I started trying to use the basic features that my Echo Show had because the Portal Plus has Alexa built into it. The portal plus is terrible! I asked a few of the basic questions. “ Hey Alexa/Portal, connect to my phone “ It wouldn’t work and I had to go to the device and click on my phone or go to my phone’s Bluetooth settings and click on the device to connect them. “ Hey Alexa/Portal, call whoever “ It said I had to connect my contacts when I already had all my accounts logged in and active. “ Hey Alexa/Portal, play Spotify “ It never worked either. It doesn’t play my music unless I connect it from my phone. So that’s makes this device almost pointless if I can’t even ask for the basic question that everything else can do. It doesn’t even have a drop in feature like the Echo Shows but it has Alexa built in!? Okay… I’ve had this device for about 2 weeks and I get home yesterday to see that my device completely reset and I had to re do everything! So I decided to go ahead and return it and exchange it for the Echo Show 10. I know it’ll do better. Really sad if you ask me. Very disappointed.

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.

I have Echo, Google, and Portal Smart displays, several of each, and, for photos, the Portals are the best. The other features are ok on the Portal but not as refined as Echo or Google. I was quite surprised with the sound quality of the Portals. Very happy with the Portal Plus.

We are having a blast with this. I got to see my grandchildren on Christmas morning. I could see the entire room and nobody had to hold a phone. It zoomed in and out depending on the activity in the room. The kids have used story time and read stories to me while looking like the characters in the story! So fun!