We got some good mileage out of them during covid as well. My WFH setup early pandemic had the large portal as my primary visual conferencing setup - it beat the hell out of a webcam on top of a monitor.
In peak covid video chat time I had a call with someone with a Portal connected to their TV. It was so much better than laptops and webcams for family videocalling. I would have bought one immediately had it not been a Meta product.
It's disappointing that 6 years later there's still no solution. The window has passed for my kids - but it would have been really nice to be able to have large format TV based video calls with the grandparents. I tried to set something up with a laptop, but it was always too janky and fiddly to work well.
If you have an Apple TV it can use an iPhone as a camera for FaceTime (you put it under your TV temporarily). Works great, presuming you already have some other reason to have the hardware.
Thanks for the description. I never ran across one of those and had no idea what the context was.
I'll put this in the bucket with all the other weird human-facing hardware that didn't work out in the market, like the Spotify Car Thing[1], Amazon Dash[2], Motorola Atrix[3], and the Corel/Rebel.com Netwinder[4].
But it's pretty cool that someone is making an effort from On-High to get adb working on these Portal devices. It's not as great as it could be, but it beats a kick in the pants.
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[1]: A cute dashtop widget that provided physical controls and a screen for Spotify and...apparently nothing else
[2]: A button! That orders one thing, only, from Amazon! Push button, receive thing! (I actually bought one of these on the first Prime Day for almost nothing. I never set it up or bothered hacking it; it got deliberately binned during the last move.)
[3]: Just plug your phone into this screen-widget, and you won't need a laptop! Pinky-swear! (And we'll have Verizon finance it for you!)
[4]: Let's sell a very low-end all-in-one tabletop ARM PC in retail stores at a direct loss, and profit from offering dial-up internet! (What could go wrong!)
We got some good mileage out of them during covid as well. My WFH setup early pandemic had the large portal as my primary visual conferencing setup - it beat the hell out of a webcam on top of a monitor.
In peak covid video chat time I had a call with someone with a Portal connected to their TV. It was so much better than laptops and webcams for family videocalling. I would have bought one immediately had it not been a Meta product.
It's disappointing that 6 years later there's still no solution. The window has passed for my kids - but it would have been really nice to be able to have large format TV based video calls with the grandparents. I tried to set something up with a laptop, but it was always too janky and fiddly to work well.
If you have an Apple TV it can use an iPhone as a camera for FaceTime (you put it under your TV temporarily). Works great, presuming you already have some other reason to have the hardware.
Thanks for the description. I never ran across one of those and had no idea what the context was.
I'll put this in the bucket with all the other weird human-facing hardware that didn't work out in the market, like the Spotify Car Thing[1], Amazon Dash[2], Motorola Atrix[3], and the Corel/Rebel.com Netwinder[4].
But it's pretty cool that someone is making an effort from On-High to get adb working on these Portal devices. It's not as great as it could be, but it beats a kick in the pants.
---
[1]: A cute dashtop widget that provided physical controls and a screen for Spotify and...apparently nothing else
[2]: A button! That orders one thing, only, from Amazon! Push button, receive thing! (I actually bought one of these on the first Prime Day for almost nothing. I never set it up or bothered hacking it; it got deliberately binned during the last move.)
[3]: Just plug your phone into this screen-widget, and you won't need a laptop! Pinky-swear! (And we'll have Verizon finance it for you!)
[4]: Let's sell a very low-end all-in-one tabletop ARM PC in retail stores at a direct loss, and profit from offering dial-up internet! (What could go wrong!)