Hello is a new phone dialer app released by Facebook.  While Facebook is a site that needs no introduction, Hello might have gone completely unnoticed by some.

Let’s start with Hello’s positives.  Hello can route calls to get sent out via data plans or WiFi.  That is big.  If you have ever been to anyone’s house where they have no cell reception, this can be a feature worth downloading Hello by itself.  Hello aims to be a caller ID for your phone.  It pulls information from Facebook to give you a little background about the caller in order for you to remember them.  For example, Rusty Shackleford calls you up and you may not remember that it is really Dale Gribble and that he is an Exterminator.  Facebook pulls from his profile to get you that information right when you need it.

But Hello, while good in concept, feels like bloatware that slows your phone and causes all of the phones basic functions to take twice as long.  Firstly, you click the dialer and the app has a load time of a few long seconds.  The current stock dialer on my Galaxy S5 takes only half a second.  When receiving a call, the app loads a blue screen with the information about the person who is calling.  However, to actually take the call you have to first swipe away the Facebook information blue screen.  After that’s gone, the app will switch to your default dialer for you to accept or reject a call.  While this doesn’t seem like something to really be too concerned with,  when you are in a rush to stop the call or answer the phone, the app can be kind of annoying.  Lastly, when you call from the Hello contact list, it will sometimes dial from your data when you do not want this.  I did not fully test this, but all of the above combined was enough to make me want to get rid of the app.  Readers should also be wary of the annoyances that come with the app.