What We Know About the 'Facebook Phone' - Wall Street Journal

Facebook sent out an announcement last night, teasing an event to come see its "new home on Android." As Evelyn Rusli and Amir Efrati reported on Digits, Facebook is expected to unveil what could essentially be dubbed the "Facebook Phone." But instead of being a Facebook-built device, it looks like it is actually a phone built by HTC with a version of Android that is heavily integrated with Facebook. Facebook's move is designed to increase the amount of time people spend on its service and thereby boost potential revenue from advertising, according to the report. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said over and over that Facebook has no interest in building a phone, rather opting to integrate deeply with existing platforms. He said building Facebook's own mobile phone is "so clearly the wrong strategy for us" during a keynote conversation in September last year. Facebook already does so with the iPhone, but on Apple's terms within the iPhone operating system. But for the hacker culture of Facebook, Android could be even more tantalizing. It's more open and more customizable than the iPhone, in which most of the user experience is kept locked down and controlled by Apple. Android phones, for example, let you modify the keyboard, while Apple believes this wouldn't end up with a good experience for end-users. Facebook has already been assembling the bits and pieces of the Facebook phone for the past several quarters. Here's what we have so far: Facebook has an application that lets you search the Web for content that's related to your friends. You can already find pages for movies, games, people and places, and your friends can share that content among themselves. With the introduction of Graph Search, it's even easier to find that content. For example, you will be able to search "movies my friends in San Francisco like." Graph Search hasn't rolled out for mobile devices yet, but Facebook has said it wants to get to it. Facebook has a messaging app that lets you contact your friends with text and media messages. On the Android app, you don't even need to log into Facebook. You can view the messages at any time from a sorted inbox. The messaging app has the ability to make phone calls. You can make voice and video calls with the app. It certainly sounds like what is coming is a roll-up of all of that with more prominent home screen play, per an earlier report: The social network has been developing new software for mobile devices powered by Google 's Android operating system that displays content from users' Facebook accounts on a smartphone's home screen–the first screen visible when they turn on the device, people familiar with the situation said. Facebook will initially demonstrate the capability on smartphones from HTC, these people said, but has been working to reach similar arrangements with other device makers. Facebook also plans on making the "app" broadly available to all Android users, and it's also talking to other manufacturers. So it might not be the "phone" everyone was expecting — but then again, most of what we'll probably see will end up being features that already exist in some form among Facebook's other array of apps. via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNFab9Ulunwe_7sCdRUUQzxSIco9HA&url=http://stream.wsj.com/story/gadget-wars/SS-2-51456/SS-2-200515/

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