The one thought I keep coming back to with Facebook Home – more so than having your personal life whored out to every ad buyer on earth, more than the prospect of seeing your friends’ most compromising pics as soon as you pull your phone out on the train – the thing I latch onto is this: unless you get the HTC First, which is apparently dumping Sense in favor of FBH, you’re most likely going to be running FBH over top of some other middleware layer (Sense, MOTOBLUR, TouchWiz) which itself is running over Android. And I think of one thing: battery.
This is the problem. I mean, the problem. Faster processors, more RAM, bigger and higher-res screens, more complex operating systems and apps, and ever-faster cellular data – battery technology hasn’t budged in about six years or so, when the lithium polymer in a SonyEricsson Z520 lasted me four days between charges. Then again, it was pushing a tiny screen and no data service to speak of. Hell, most of its power went toward changing themes and flipping between ringtones. No RSS, no Twitter (except via SMS), no web browsing or Instagram or podcasts or streaming March Madness action. And the only real advance in battery life…is to make it bigger. In fact, that’s half the reason Android phones all grew to 5 inch screens: more room for battery in an OS not known for power management.
I accept that I need to plug the iPhone in at the end of the day. Time was, that was enough – normal workday meant the phone went down to about 30%, but that was good enough. Then the retina display, and live podcast updating instead of syncing off the laptop, and then Verizon and LTE…and now I have a charge cable at my desk and a spare charge pack in the bag and, most recently, an actual iPod shuffle for the reliable standby music once the podcasts are done. It’s almost enough that I can get through the day and have battery enough to go to dinner or something and not be completely wiped. It’s also why I stick to the Kindle for reading at home rather than use one of the iOS devices. Using two devices – three, now, on Tuesday nights – might see woefully inefficient, but the Kindle charges once a week and the dumb phone once a month. And there’s something to be said for never having to worry about charge.
So now we’re back to Facebook Home, which is essentially replacing your phone’s UI with a live feed of your FB account. Status updates. Pictures. Chat. All in real time, or something close to it, and no doubt running location services the whole way (how else to sell geolocation-connected information to advertisers? Because yes, Zuck admits as much, there will be ads in your feed in FBH eventually). All this plus Android’s well-known fruit-fly battery performance? You’ll be plugging in the phone twice a day minimum.
And that’s what will do for them. Not privacy concerns from the kind of user base that would have equated AOL with the Internet fifteen years ago. Not performance issues from heaping superfluous code on superfluous code. What’s going to make Ed Earl Brown chuck his FacePhone out the truck window is when he plugs it in at lunchtime to top up and still plugs a dead phone into the cigarette lighter for the drive home. It’s the same reason the first iPhone didn’t ship with 3G capacity, or a higher-res screen, or an app framework or any kind of user-alterable code: because if the first 2007 iPhone couldn’t make it through the whole day, there probably would never have been an iPhone 3G.
Mark my words, Facebook Home will live or die on one metric: whether your battery does.