And so the “Facebook Phone” has finally landed.

Only problem is, it isn’t a phone at all, but simply just an app. That’s right folks, despite all the fanfare and cries of “Wow! A Facebook phone!” and the rest of the buzz generated around yesterday’s event, all the ‘event’ in question was actually about was a jumped up smartphone application.

Facebook Home, as it’s known, is essentially just a customized Android launcher that shoves Facebook right to the front of your phone’s functionality. The launcher will be available to download on just six Android phones to begin with when it hits Google Play next Friday, while it’ll also be built into the new HTC First (THE Facebook Phone) as standard.

To summarize, an Android launcher is an app that rejigs everything about how your smartphone works, replacing the home screen and app drawer with its own setup. It doesn’t remove anything or alter the phone’s functionality in any way, and neither is it a fully modified version of Android like HTC Sense, Samsung ToucWiz or Kindle Fire – all it does is to sit on top of the Android OS, kind of like a new “skin”.

Android launchers have actually been around for donkeys years – there are several decent ones in the Google Play store now, like Nova, Apex and Holo if you’re interested in trying one out. Traditionally, the idea of launchers is that they allow users to tweak and customize their smartphone experience, but with the Facebook launcher things are a little different. Facebook Home takes over the phone’s home screen and lock screen, replacing it with your news feed, and also integrates Chat Heads, a dual Facebook/SMS messaging system that’s constantly running in the background.

Now I’m virulently anti-Facebook at the best of times, but from the perspective of hardcore Facebook users ‘Home’ doesn’t actually look that bad. For anyone whose life revolves around Facebook, they’ll probably welcome the fact that it subsumes everything else on their phone. But what about everyone else – you know, those 90% of people who actually have lives?

Why Facebook Home Will Flop

For anyone who’s familiar with the old Motorola smartphones circa about three or four years ago, all of this Facebook Home fanfare might sound a bit familiar. That’s because Motorola once had its own Android launcher of sorts, called Motoblur. Not quite a fully-fledged launcher, Motoblur basically shoved a ton of widgets onto the home screen, in order to keep users entertained with a steady stream of updates from their various social media networks.

Motoblur kept us up to date with everything from Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, our favorite news feeds, the weather and more, doing so by tapping into these networks and sending everything to the phone via its own servers. All of this data was pushed through Motorola’s servers in order to keep the processing to an absolute minimum, but even with this safeguard their phones were notorious for constant lagging and poor battery life – so much so that the constant criticism Motorola received eventually led to them dropping Motoblur altogether.

One can’t help thinking that Facebook Home will come up against the same problems that plagued Motoblur. Phone batteries are going to take a hell of a battering with all that Facebook data (images, updates, ads) constantly being streamed into the device, and this could also take quite a toll on those who still have limited data plans.

And there’s the users themselves to consider – won’t people get fed up with the constant barrage of Facebook updates literally overwhelming their phones? I know I would, and pretty damn quickly too. I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t enjoy the fact that all of my apps are going to be buried deep within Facebook either. Sure, the app drawer is still there, but it can only be accessed via your Facebook stream, and you’re still open to assault from people messaging you when using other apps.

We’ve also got the ads to look forward to – and going by Facebook’s history, we’ll see more than our fair share of them. Granted, the ads won’t appear on Facebook Home ‘yet’, but Zuckerberg has already indicated that this is just a stay of execution until the inevitable arrives. No doubt Facebook’s plan is to woo users during this ad-free honeymoon period, before launching a full-scale ad assault later on. Give it a few months – perhaps two, perhaps three – and we’ll soon see ‘sponsored posts’ appearing everywhere we look. Of course, we might be used to ads on our news feed already, but the difference here is that now our news feed is our home screen and lock screen, meaning we’ll see them the moment we ‘swipe’ our phones on.

The ads may even get worse too – after all, didn’t Zuckerberg once say “they trust me, dumb fucks”?

Well I’m sorry to say, but I don’t trust you Zuckerberg, you dumb fuck. Who really knows just how much you have altered, or will alter, our devices with Home? If ‘Chatheads’ can start popping up anytime, anywhere on our phones, what’s to stop those sponsored posts  one day doing the exact same thing?

Facebook Home will undoubtedly be good for Facebook, but unless you happen to be one of those who lives and breathes Facebook every minute you spend online, it probably won’t be good for you.