Facebook's new Portal device: It is meant to bring people closer together

The great thing about these devices is that they are stationary and always on

Facebook’s new gadgets, Portal and Portal Plus, are meant to bring people closer together.

So we — Mike Isaac and Farhad Manjoo, two technology writers for The New York Times — took the $199 and $349 devices for a test run over the last week to see if they could make us feel more connected to each other.

We both installed the Portal, which starts shipping on Thursday, in our homes (our bedrooms, to be exact). The devices are video-calling machines that people can use to talk through a screen to other Facebook users. They have a 12-megapixel camera with high-definition video