You can easily hear whoever you are chatting with whether you're leaning in during the call or sitting back.Īs for battery life, we never came close to running out of juice during a call, but Facebook told CNBC that the Portal Go has enough battery to last up to five hours of one-on-one calling via Messenger or 14 hours of listening with its screen off. With a 10.1-inch screen and an excellent speaker system, the Portal Go makes video calls that are crystal clear in both visuals and sound. They were able to position their Portal Go testing device at the head of their table, making us feel like part of the dinner. We also tried the Portal Go to call my partner's family during their weekly dinner. So I picked up the Portal Go and moved to a different room. I received a call on the Portal Go while my partner was working in the same room. Portability might seem like a small difference, but that feature distinguishes the Portal Go. Short video calls can be fine on a phone, but anything longer than five minutes is better situated for a dedicated video calling device like the Portal Go.Īmazon has the $249.99 Echo Show and Google offers the $229 Nest Hub Max, but none of those devices are portable, forcing you to make your video call in whatever spot where you connected your gadget to an outlet (hopefully you picked somewhere comfortable). I liked that I could use it while relaxing on the couch and then pick it up and continue my call while cooking. Once situated, I was able to enjoy my video call hands-free. At times I chatted with friends while on the move, but often, I would simply take the Portal Go and sit it on my coffee table, my bed or my kitchen counter. The Portal Go sits on a charging mount when not in use, but as soon as you have a call to make, you can grab it by the handle notch hidden in its posterior and move it wherever you need to go. I could initiate calls by searching for my friends on the device. The Portal Go would ring if they called me, and I could accept by touching the screen. In my testing of the gadget, I was able to use the Portal Go to call friends and family via Messenger and WhatsApp. The Portal Go is fantastic for video calling, but do you really want a Facebook-controlled camera in your home? Unfortunately, for everything there is to like about the Portal Go - I like the big 10.1-inch screen, the portability and the speakers - the device is made by Facebook, and over the past several years, the social media company has wrecked its trust with its users, lawmakers worldwide and consumers at large. Since the fourth quarter of 2018 when the first Portal devices were released, Facebook's Other revenue has grown nearly 223% from $274 million to close to $885 million in the fourth quarter of 2020.
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In its financial results, the company includes Portal within its "Other" revenue stream, which also includes its Oculus virtual reality headsets and Workplace enterprise communication software businesses. Along with the new Portal+, the Portal Go is Facebook's first redesign of its video calling device since 2019, and in that time, it shows that Facebook has only gotten better a putting together hardware products.įacebook has never broken out sales figures for its Portal devices, so it's hard to say how successful these products are.