Facebook Portal TV | Review

 

in today's video we're talking about the facebook portal tv let's get to it [Music] what's up guys and welcome to top shelf media so like i mentioned we are talking about the facebook portal tv today and i did a video on the facebook portal plus a little over a year ago and if you haven't seen that i'll link it up in the youtube card you can go check that out but i'll also put links down in the description for the facebook portal tv if you're interested in that go check that out as well but without any further ado let's jump right in the facebook portal tv is 95 on amazon at the time of recording this video and it turns your tv into a video calling device the portal itself has a 12.5 megapixel camera on the front as well as a cover that can slide over the lens if you don't quite trust facebook it also has an indicator light on the front as well as a button on the side that allows you to turn the mic and camera on or off on the back you have a power port an hdmi port and a type-c port the portal tv has eight built-in microphones and uses smart sound to reduce background noise and enhance voice you can use facebook messenger whatsapp and zoom to make video calls let's go back in time to when i was getting it installed okay so we're gonna get this thing installed real quick and one thing they do not include an hdmi cable so just note that when you're going to install it you will need an hdmi cable because it is an hdmi out on the back of this it's a pretty heavy uh camera you know there's no tape there's no anything like that this should rest you know centered up on my tv you know kind of like this and i'm assuming how it goes um so let's get this installed [Music] once the installation and setup is complete the portal tv is very easy to navigate it does come with a remote and if you hit the home button on the remote it will take you straight to the input on your tv for the portal tv but because there are no navigation buttons on the portal tv itself you do need to make sure you do not lose this remote but unlike the portal plus that is a touch screen and you had to physically touch it to be able to do stuff i love that this portal has a remote so you do everything except slide the camera cover off now i would say portal's claim to fame is the fact that they can follow you around the room and as you can see it does a pretty good job panning and zooming in order to keep me in frame now i have noticed a few times when doing this with my family and stuff if my son gets up and runs across the room and comes back it kind of forgets to zoom back in now that has only happened a handful of times and as you can see it isn't the smoothest thing but it works the portal tv does have the hey portal voice options as well as alexa built in two things that the portal tv can do that i really haven't had much time with is watch together and story time watch together allows you to watch facebook watch originals with your friends as well as netflix and prime video you can also listen to spotify and pandora story time allows you to read stories to your loved ones even when you're away one thing you will notice is that it does look a little pixelated the picture quality kind of goes down when it zooms in this far you can tell it just it doesn't look quite quite right but this is actually kind of cool um i messed with this look at that i've messed with this a little bit on the facebook portal plus uh this this is actually kind of cool i think this would be very useful especially if you do have um young ones and you know if i'm if i'm gone for work overnight or something like that this would be something really easy to call in on the portal that's awesome uh call in on the portal and uh you know read a story so that's pretty cool when the portal is not in use you can actually use it to display photos from instagram facebook or photos that you have uploaded to the portal app now i don't think with this portal that that feature is really going to be used all that much because it is on your tv if you're not using the portal more than likely it's going to be off or you're going to be watching something else okay so real quick let's just look at the portal apps here and if we go down i mean there's a lot of apps here i'm i'm actually surprised you know that i heart radio app we can go to show time so if i want that i can go ahead and download that and add that to my portal uh it's really cool so whether it's movies sports just regular tv or apps like photo booth here where you can just kind of have fun with your family while you're all hanging on the living room let's check that out real quick it really uh has trouble staying on my head even with slight movement no now it's getting messy but it's flickering not great snapchat does it better so is the facebook portal tv worth it and in this case i'd have to say yeah it's a hundred dollars and for that you get an easy to use and easy to set up video calling device and for us as an added bonus it's up and out of the way on top of the tv so i don't have to worry about my son touching it or messing with it when we're on a video call with family and friends so i think with ease of use and the affordable price tag i think this is really worth it okay guys that's gonna do it for me today i hope you enjoyed this video if you did give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing and ringing that bell to get notified when i post new content if you like this video and want to see more videos from me youtube thinks you like that one right there so go check that out as always i hope you enjoyed this one and i'll see you in the next video you

■ Does Facebook Portal TV Worth Paying? | Features & Setup Explained

what's up folks it's annis here in this video i will show you guys how facebook's portal tv works and hopefully um it'll make sense why i'm using it i've been using it for i want to say for a few months and i'm super happy about it and so that's why i wanted to record this video and share a little bit about my experiences with using portal tv for video conferencing for streaming for all the other purposes so with that in mind let's jump right into it all right folks when you unbox facebook's portal tv it's gonna come with the main device which looks like this it's like a horizontal camera thing and then you connect that to either a monitor or tv whatever you prefer here in this setup i have it on my one on my computer monitor at my office room but you can also set it up to your tv which is what the intention is but it works with any kind of monitor and then it comes with a hdmi cable so you gotta connect that cable to your monitor or tv and then it's gonna have a little cable for battery that's all that is for the setup so you just gotta hook those things and then you're ready to go and then it's got this little remote which is really comfortable to use and easy to use so there's the button to turn it on and off so i'm just gonna turn it on now when the screen is on you're gonna see your recent whatsapp contacts you will be able to make a call directly um you go down a little bit there's apps um it's got you know cbs news plato spotify it's got zoom which is really cool um there's many more apps you can download um i haven't really downloaded much to be honest but i think you can go to this app and then you can do find all these apps that um facebook's system has it's got netflix espn there's many streaming devices unfortunately it doesn't have youtube at this point um as i'm recording this video maybe in the future but at this point unfortunately they don't have youtube i wish they had it um it's got some suggestions by amazon um prime and then slink paramount again there's mini apps to be honest i'm only using this for video conferencing but i can see someone wanting to use this for mainly for streaming which makes sense it's really fast i have a roku tv from 2018 compared to this this is way faster way better it's easier to use so you can buy this you can use it for video conferencing but also you can use it for streaming so if you are thinking about replacing your making your tv smart um if you're thinking of buying roku this is a good alternative for that plus it's got the camera functionality this thing also has a cover for the camera so you can turn it on and off if you have privacy issues if you're concerned about facebook somewhat stealing your data uh you can do that they also have this little button on the right side which turns turns the camera and mic on and off so currently it's off so you see the red light if you click it it's gonna be on um well i guess my thing is off now but you can see if i push this button it's gonna go red meaning camera and mic are off i really like that feature maybe i'll show you guys a little bit about how the camera is like why it's good camera so what you can do for that is it's got this like self camera check mode without calling anyone so i can click any of my contacts right um and then when you click you when you click video it makes the video call again this is using whatsapp so the person has to be added as your contacts you can do audio calls you can favorite people and then they have this thing called uh check self video or self view i guess you click that and then the camera is going to show up again the cool thing about this camera is that the camera actually moves so it actually follows you along so i don't know how much you can tell at this point but it's supposed to keep track of your movement i'm gonna zoom in a little bit hopefully the camera will show you better um as i'm like going further and further from my desk the camera is actually getting closer um i don't know how you can tell but i'm sitting on my couch and the distance is probably something like 10 feet or so but i'm still pretty visible the camera pretty much zooms in to some level um it's also got like a wide angle when you're closer for that so overall i'm pretty happy uh it keeps track of you like for instance i just stood up look how it's like following me um i don't know overall i'd really like it like uh this would be good if you have like a really like big room um like in a living room setting or whatever it would be perfect this is like a three two or three year old webcam i think it works better than that but you know it's really cool so i really like the feature and then as i'm getting closer and closer let me zoom out it's gonna be pretty wide angle as you can tell microphone quality is pretty good you can easily navigate using the uh remote you can volume up and down you can have direct access to netflix so if i click netflix it's gonna leave the call and then just go to netflix and again it's pretty fun i can directly click the home page it'll take me to home page right away there's a amazon video access facebook watch i've never used that but people use that um so yeah folks this is my take on this i really like facebook portal tv again i'm a person who does a lot of video calls to friends family um so for that purpose i i have been happy about it um and i'm pretty sure if you need those things i mean it would be helpful for you as well and then you click um the power button it turns it off and then what i'll do is i'll put this thing on and then hit the device so it's off so right now the device is totally off there's no way it can record it so i'm feeling pretty happy folks hopefully you enjoyed this video like this video please comment if you have any questions about this device i i will be happy to respond and help you guys if you're thinking if you're in the market thinking about buying facebook portal tv i would be happy to answer your questions if you feel like i should be doing more of these videos please subscribe my channel and and again leave your comments so thank you so much folks i hope you will have a good one