Portal originally made its debut in 2018, and since that time, Meta has introduced new models, with its latest, the Portal Go, arriving just last year. For the most part, the devices have failed to gain traction, with a majority of complaints having to do with concerns about privacy. There's also heavy competition from Amazon with its Echo devices. But, apparently, after trying for five years, Meta will finally throw in the towel on its Portal project, with no future immediate plans to produce any new hardware.

The news comes from Reuters by way of The Verge, which reports that the company is completely discontinuing sales of its Portal hardware. The writing seems to have been on the wall for some time, with very little noise about the products and its strategy to switch from consumers to business customers in the middle of last year. With things slowly returning to normal, companies have been suffering left and right. Unfortunately, that means companies have had to tighten their belts, with Meta delivering quite a blow this week, announcing that it would lay off 11,000 employees.

In addition to its layoffs, internal reports showed that it would also be cutting funding to certain projects, one of which being Portal. In addition to Portal, Reuters also shared that Meta was also halting its progress on two of its smartwatches. For the most part, these devices will most likely not be missed too much, and to be honest, I had completely forgotten about them until this report.

If unfamiliar with Portal, the big feature of these devices was that they allowed folks to communicate using Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. It could also act as a smart home hub with assistance from Amazon's Alexa. The quality of video calls was very good, thanks to its cameras, and if you felt like the camera was a bit much, you could always cover it with the built-in slider. While the initial reviews were good, most brought up the concern for privacy, which in my opinion, was the culprit that most likely led to poor sales.

Meta has not publicly commented on this as yet, so for now, there could be a chance that Portal keeps chugging along. But if I were you, I wouldn't go out and buy a brand-new one any time soon and instead find some other more reliable smart home product during the early Black Friday sales.

Source: Reuters

Via: The Verge