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Please Don't Throw Away This Dead Smart Display
What This Video Covers
- Learn how Facebook's abandoned Portal can be repurposed into a useful smart display with just a few minutes of setup.
- See what Immortal Launcher, PortalHub, and Space Portal add, from family dashboards and photo frames to an ISS mission tracker.
- Understand what this modification actually does, its limitations, and the privacy tradeoffs before putting a Portal back into daily use.
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Facebook killed the Portal smart display years ago. Support ended, features got stripped, and it looked like these were headed for the junk drawer. Then Facebook did something surprising: they opened up ADB access. And a community of developers turned an abandoned $20 gadget into something genuinely great.
In this video:
Why the Portal was doomed from day one (hint: it wasn't the hardware)
How "jailbreaking" a Portal actually works (spoiler: it's not a full jailbreak, and it's stupidly easy)
Installing the Immortal launcher and turning it into a photo frame / smart display
PortalHub — a free family dashboard with a "magic words" trick that turns calendar entries into to-do lists and grocery lists automatically
Space Portal — a NASA-style ISS tracker, because why not
What this thing still can't do, and what to know before you put a camera in your living room.
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