Review on Facebook Portal Plus - 15.6” Smart Video Calling Display with Alexa - Black by Ryan Ramirez

First of all I think this is a great idea and an exciting product. A simple turnkey Facetime device with some great features. The problem is that this is a product of Facebook, which is really only known for its social networking app and not for any specialized hardware. And there is a big difference between these two worlds. Compared to many other apps, social media apps are neither very demanding nor very complex programs. Especially if they are written to work in the browser world. Dedicated hardware applications, on the other hand, must consider not only the dedicated application running on it, but also the hardware and device interfaces that allow it to connect to the outside world. This can get very complicated when you're trying to make these complex hardware interactions very simple and bulletproof. Given how easy this type of thing has become in this day and age of Wi-Fi connected smartphones, computers, laptops, and streaming devices, it's easy to miss this complexity if you haven't been in the hardware world for a while . And this is where this device fails. When this device is started, it immediately presents the user with a list of available WiFi connections. You select the desired network and will be prompted to enter the password for that network. Sounds easy, but when it crashes you don't get much information as to why it crashed, so troubleshooting it is a challenge. The device does not contain any information on where to get support. So if you don't know how to search google and find the support site, you're stuck. Once you contact the support team they will guide you through some very simple troubleshooting steps such as: B. restarting the device and turning your wireless router on and off (which will affect everyone or anything else using that router during that time). After these few simple steps it goes beyond what first level support can offer and they escalate it to a more advanced support team who in my case simply emailed me to pass it on to Revain send it back and get a replacement. Given that experience, I thought they really weren't ready for today's more complex hardware environment and simply sent them back for a refund. The device came with very little support information. If you're trying to make it look simple, then it should be bulletproof. Otherwise it's just frustrating and not worth the time. Especially for the price they charge for it.