The largest social network in the world, Facebook, has such a huge amount of data on millions of people around the world that it really has to find a way to make the most of it, to earn money on it and also to offer more contact services. Facebook then tries to conquer more field in the telephony sector by launching a new application that should, in full and in objectives, replace the default one of the phone on Android smartphones .
Contrary to iPhones, in fact, the function called in Android is also managed by an app that can be changed.
We saw, in another article, the best apps for making calls (dialers), managing Contacts and Address Book on Android .
Among these you can now also insert Facebook Hello, an app officially launched in the USA, which can, however, also be downloaded on every Italian smartphone with Android system, to try it and see it in action .
UPDATE: Facebook Hello no longer exists. In another article, the apps to recognize unknown numbers .
The application has, for now, nothing revolutionary as its creators and some newspapers or blogs that love sensationalist titles would like to believe.
Facebook Hello is an app to manage the address book of the Android smartphone, which also allows you to make direct calls and see some information related to your friends' Facebook profiles.
The good thing about Hello is that it incorporates most of the functions needed for a dialer with the addition of other fancy things.
so there is a numeric keypad with search box that supports the T9 dictionary to quickly search for a contact's name.
You can set your contacts as favorites to find them easily and there is the classic call log with calls made, missed and received.
Since Hello is integrated with Facebook, it combines the phone's contact list with the Facebook friends list .
For Facebook friends who added their phone number to their Facebook account.
Writing the phone number on Facebook settings, in the "mobile" section, is useful for security reasons in order to recover the account and receive the approval code and also to send free SMS with Facebook and make free calls from the Messenger.
Note that the phone number is shown in the profile information tab, unless you change its visibility, putting " just me ".
Facebook Hello, thanks to this integration, makes a nice synchronization of all the contacts in Facebook by filling in cards with all the information visible from the profile and with the updated photo which is a very convenient thing.
From Facebook Hello you can open a contact's card and call him for free via Facebook Messenger by touching the relevant button.
In the application settings you can discover the special and additional functions that should distinguish this app from others.
In particular, you can see who is calling with automatic number recognition .
If a shop or a person who is registered with Facebook calls us, we will see his name even if we do not have the number in the address book.
Every time someone calls us, we will then see his photo and his name and this will happen both for the contacts in the address book and for the others that are not stored .
You can also block unwanted calls from numbers that are often blocked, from hidden numbers or even from specific handwritten numbers.
As a basic flaw, Hello lacks shortcuts for calling someone quickly, it only ties to Facebook and not to other social networks (such as Contacts +).
Unlike TrueCaller, which uses the directories of its users, Hello, however, more precise data on the people registered on Facebook and for this it does the job of identification better.
Hello, as well as TrueCaller has a good effectiveness in blocking call center telephone numbers and commercial calls in an almost automatic way.
The main flaw in Hello is that it looks like an overlay when a call is received.
In practice, to answer you must first swipe away the Hello screen and then press the answer button, with a double job that is not exactly the best.
To try Facebook Hello, you can download the app from the Google Play Store on every Android smartphone (for now only from the USA).
To install Hello without Play Store you can instead download the APK file from the APkMirror site as I did.
Even though it is not an official source, the app is safe, original and verified.
To install it on Android, however, you need to enable the unknown sources option in the phone's security settings.
After installation, you must log in with Facebook login and password (I repeat the app is verified and true, without deception and without tricks to steal passwords).
Be careful though because the updates are not installed automatically and you will have to visit the APKMirror page every now and then to see if there is a new version.
The app is excellent if you have a phonebook full of friends registered on Facebook, otherwise it can only be a duplicate of the default dialer.
We will see the next improvements and updates if they bring relevant news or not.
