Facebook Portal Reviews

My 88 year old mother in law calls Portal “her joy.” She refused any phone technology but the Portal has captured her heart. Now during quarantine it is even more valuable. Photos from family and video chats keep her in touch with loved ones around the world. Easy for her to use. Easy for family to support. Check in on her health and state of mind. Share family events live. All
She has to do is push a button to answer calls. Photos show up with no effort on her part. It is a wonderful thing.

You can only update 30 photos at a time. Uploading directly from my iPhone Photo app or Google Photos app and sharing it to the portal app never works. It freezes when it’s uploading photos once I choose an album... even if it’s just one photo I’m trying to upload. (I’ve tried on multiple devices)
The reason I’m trying to upload directly from my iPhone Photos app or Google Photos is because the Portal app takes forever to scroll through my photos even if I’m only going back a few months.

If they can get this function fixed I will update my rating to a 4 or 5. Otherwise it’s way to tedious to upload photos.

Update 1: It was really annoying to not have the remote functionally work. Even though FB took long, they have fixed it. Had to uninstall and reinstall FacebookPortal to get the remote functionally to work again.

Old review: I can’t believe that a company the size of FB can provide an app half baked. When using the remote feature for my FB Portal TV I keep getting an error ‘something went wrong’. I have to dismiss it for every click. FB please fix this ASAP!!!

My mom is currently living in an assisted living facility during the COVID-19 pandemic. She has very limited visitation opportunities. She has dementia and cannot operate a smart phone or tablet as the touch screens are confusing to her. With the portal device we can initiate video calls without her having touch the device. She just has to be cued to say “hey portal call.....”. It has been a blessing to her and has improved our awareness of her needs remotely. We just set it up facing her recliner. Great product.

We have a big family and recently lost our loving mother who was married to our dad for 70 years. I bought one of these for my dad and it’s been a life saver for him to communicate with the family as some of us live far away. He loves having the pictures on it also and I add different ones from time to time to entertain him.

Initially this worked fine but only 50 at a time. No way to go directly to the month or year, you have to scroll and scroll until you find the pics you want. All of a sudden it stop working. There is supposedly no picture limit but I am no longer able to add any more pictures. Tried deleting and reinstalling FacebookPortal . Tried resetting my portal, tried creating a new album just in case there was a picture limit for albums. NONE of this worked. This was a gift so that I could keep in contact with my family. Very frustrated with this!

I love the portal. I use it in a group video chat setting daily. My only issue is every time the “transfer to portal” option is used, it calls every person who had joined that “room” since it opened. It also creates 1, sometimes 2, new random messenger groups with all the members in it. It’s extremely annoying to have to leave 20+ groups a day. I report the issue but nothing has changed.

The Portal has been a life saver as my family has been able to stay safely in contact with my Mom during the pandemic. We use it nearly every day and do a group chat once a week. And it’s been so easy to use.

Keep adding features! I’d love a way to remotely see my mom’s app choices so I can help her set up the apps like Netflix and Zoom. Right now, I can’t help her remotely.

Received Portal for Christmas 2019. Big changes in 2020. New and first grand daughter and son deployed to Japan. Portal allows us to nightly watch our grand daughter grow and stay in touch. Our son “visits” with us twice a week. Portal has a crystal clear picture and great sound. No delay in transmission of communication. PLUS we can add our photos as a slide show that we enjoy through the day.
Wonderful tool. Love it.
Harvey of Iowa.

I love that I can display photos to my portal (a digital picture frame). Everyone that visits my home also enjoys seeing those that are most important in my life and sharing in the memories we’ve made together.

Great tool for the house for video calls to family and friends, Alexa built in also is a plus. Just needs a “drop in” option on FacebookPortal so that you can view your home when away and not having to have someone there to answer. Alexa echo has this capability so I don’t see why this couldn’t be included in a future update.

I used to be able to call my kitchen portal from my iPhone. However when I use FacebookPortal and click on kitchen portal, it just goes to messenger if I wanted to message someone. A few weeks ago it use to work great. I used this as an in house intercom to talk to my other family members. Now this function doesn’t work. Please bring it back so I can call other portals in my house.

1. Be able to move small PIP screen to a different corner, and…
2. Be able to control zoom and pan manually as an option.

Otherwise this is a great product and with 150 up and down speeds it solid latency. Sound quality still needs a little improvement but very acceptable as is.

There is no iPad app. It would be nice if I could upload pictures to my parents portals directly, sharing an album with them and ask them to download FacebookPortal and enable the shared album is a bit much. Also, it would be nice if I get a warning about uploading duplicate files. Since the upload limit is so low, its hard to remember if I’ve uploaded that picture or not.

The Portal has a better picture and more consistent audio than any tablet, computer or phone we have, making it nearly perfect for videoconferencing. If Meta builds in support for full Zoom functionality, provides a jack for earbuds or wired headphones, and maybe a usb - it would be perfect. Even without, it’s a great device.

My mom is 94, not only does this keep pictures for her, but we can call her and she can see us face to face. With Covid it has let her feel connected with family!

The pictures are great, but I cannot seem to figure out what else it does. If no other people I know has one, there’s not much to do with it.

Since I haven’t seen this part of the family for so long, this is the next best thing.

Every time I try to use FacebookPortal to choose photos, it kicks me out. Also, it doesn’t even matter which photos you choose because it continually displays the same random 20 photos anyway. I’ve selected hundreds of photos and I see the same ones over and over. FacebookPortal and the portal itself are terrible.

We love the portal for regular visits with elderly parent in a residential facility. Favorite part is casting photos to the screen during the calls. Suddenly FacebookPortal has stopped casting function. Message suggests that app needs to be updated but no update is feasible on FacebookPortal . 🤨

I love this portal for my father that’s a senior. The sound is great. The ease of use is spectacular. FacebookPortal helps me upload pictures and make him see beautiful memories.

Need full control in app so folks help help their elderly parents grandparents remotely who are not tech savvy. This is important FB!

Doesn’t start, portal device doesn’t update

Update: Developer response is correct that the bug was in Messenger. Updating the Messenger app did not fix the problem for me—I had to completely delete and redownload FacebookPortal —but it works now!

Thanks for the quick response! (I guess it wasn’t like “trying to call yourself with your own phone number” after all 🤔.)

Old review:
Yes, it SAYS you can [call your own device]. But when you hit the big “call” button on FacebookPortal , it just opens the Messenger app [and nothing happens]. I tried chatting Portal support, and the person I talked just denied that it is even possible to call your own Portal. He told me (exact quote) “you can't call your account from the same account. The Portal works by using Facebook Messenger. So, that would be like trying to call yourself with your own phone number.”

So I don’t know if he’s just an idiot, or whether Portal customer support people actually aren’t trained on the basic features of the device, or if FacebookPortal is just glitchy and worthless. But either way, I can’t call my own Portal. So one star for the device, or FacebookPortal , or the help.

I love the portal for video calls, but the iOS app and the photo management system in general has some flaws.

1. They make it very cumbersome to add photos to your Portal from your Apple photos library. You can only upload 50 at a time, and you have to select each photo individually, which is a real pain if you want to add a lot of photos. I suspect that they neglect this feature because they want users to add photos to Facebook instead.

2. When you add photos to Portal from your Apple photos, it changes their order around, which makes it hard to find the spot where you left off.

3. It doesn’t successfully add all the photos you select. I tried to add two batches of 50 photos each. So there should be 100 photos on my portal, but only 82 of them made it over. And because the order is off, the only way to figure out which ones didn’t make it would be a real chore.

I was so excited to get my Portal last spring to enable our small company to use Facebook Live for our sales meetings. Much to my disappointment, it did not do that.
The promise for this year has been, “we’re bringing FB Live to Portal”! Yes, now you can do Live — but only to all friends or selections of individuals. No groups. Please bring this functionality ASAP! It’s only half as functional without!

Need the ability to call home and view when no one is there to answer. If your concerned about privacy allow people to describe the feature or they can always put the fob over the camera. Also like being able to view my Alexa cameras but wish motion alerts would come across the portal screen then I could touch to view.

When FacebookPortal works it is great. Unfortunately it is too buggy and fails to connect to my iPhone Photos. I’ve tried it on several iPhones and it consistently fails to work. I resorted to putting some pictures onto a Samsung phone, downloading FacebookPortal from the Google play store - and it seems to be able to upload those. It’s rather cumbersome workaround. Please can you fix asap.

But it would be great to be able to make calls to contacts form the portal app on the phone. Something like a remote ports I guess. Thank you!

I love the fact that I could take
My video calls on my tv feel like were in back to the future move seen 👍🏼

When I am away from home I can’t see if anyone is in my house. Am I able to connect something to it so I can see what is going on in my house

Would be great to use app to initiate calls
Cant make settings change through app
Cant answer portal calls through app
........

Works ok, but while it is playing the slideshow it keeps telling me to tap to interact with the photo. Can’t turn that off. Annoying!

It’s a good app to control Superframe features portal and many more.

Always freeze when I can’t touch on touchscreen and I always want live on FB so where is!?
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