Facebook is offering you a new dialpad with its Hello app which is a marvel to look at considering that most developers are not interested in this aspect of your phone. We mean, who calls anyone up anymore, right? We prefer antagonizing our service providers by using our office and home Wi-Fi connections to send messages through WhatsApp and the like.
Facebook Hello is only available for Android since Apple doesn’t grant the app all the permissions it needs in order to function. It replaces your phone’s stock dialer by Google with a its very own interface. The contacts information on your device is combined with the publicly available data on the social networking site.
If you know someone on Facebook and they’ve made their number visible to friends, then it will be synced with the data on your smartphone. Hello works as an Android caller ID application, which means it reveals mysterious callers if the information is available. You can block unwelcome numbers since these show up as such.
Also see: Facebook now working on a Caller ID app for Android, named ‘Phone’
The app also automatically blocks callers who’ve been blacklisted by too many people. Since Hello integrates listings on Facebook within the dialpad, it should be easy to look up nearby restaurants, hotels or places to hang out at through the search box, provided that the required data can be publicly accessed through the social network.
You can make a VoIP call through Facebook Messenger in case you’d prefer not to use up your voice minutes. The launch of Hello doesn’t come as a surprise since it was leaked as ‘Phone’ previously. We haven’t tried it out, but we’re hoping contacts won’t get stored twice messily just because their name on our device and Facebook is different.
The Facebook Hello app can be got from Google Play Store by following this link. It’s free to download, though it’s not available in every country across the globe as yet.