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

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.

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.

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.

My grandbabies moved out of state and I got 2 of these to keep the connection. We call each other all the time and its so easy to play games. We even get Alexa in on the fun, my grandkids will tell Alexa to play a song and we all just dance all around the house and just like its suppose to the Portal follows us. Sometimes we have to be sneaky when were trying to play hide and seek so Portal doesnt follow us and give up or location before the other peeson is done counting. If you need to stay connected this is an amazing option.

My In-laws live overseas and they are of old age. Bought two and, after setting it up, sent it to them. Just at the push of button, we can do a video call with amazing sound and video quality. Highly recommend.

I love the way the camera follows you around. I bought one for my daughter also, and she can carry on a conversation while preparing her dinner. Its almost like being in the same room with her. The picture quality is great. I also like that I can have it show me the news if I miss it on television.

I liked it but my 4 year old son couldnt operate it by himself and I bought it for him so he could try to video chat with me so I would give it five stars but him not so much I think its more for adults they said there is Facebook games on there but it didnt really have that and theres no YouTube kids so he can watch anything on YouTube and I dont like that I think its a great product but I think it could use some updates or improvements

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

I bought this product, because I would like to be near to my family. The product serves its purpose. In my opinion, it has good speakers, microphone and screen quality, but the apps are very limited and the interface could be better. I’ve been using over two months and no technical issues show up until now. Hope they try to improve this product software, because I believe that it has potential to be a great product.

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!