Another day, another new app from Facebook.
Facebook today launched Hello, a new app that wants to become your new dialer. Hello can display information about who’s calling you, even if you don’t have their contact info stored in your phone, and you can also search for people and businesses using Facebook and call them without having to leave the app. Hello will also pull in all of the latest Facebook information about your contacts so that your contact book is always up to date without requiring any effort from you.
Facebook’s Hello app also lets you block incoming calls. You can choose to block specific phone numbers, and when you do, those calls will go straight to your voicemail. You can also choose to let Hello automatically block calls from phone numbers that’ve been blocked by a lot of other people.
Hello is built by the group behind Facebook Messenger. As a result, the app also includes built-in texting using Messenger.
Hello is available now on Android. With its ability to display information about callers that aren’t in your contacts and the ability to pull information from Facebook like a friend’s birthday or a business’s hours, the app looks like it could be worth a try. Google does offer a Caller ID feature in Android 4.4 and up that will display the name of unknown callers, but Hello can also let you search for businesses and easily call them, so it’s got that going for it. Certainly your phone can already perform most of the functions of Hello, but Facebook hopes to attract users by taking features from many different apps and building them all into one.
What do you think of Hello? If you download it, be sure to share your first impressions with us!
