Remember the Facebook Phone rumours and Facebook’s vigorous denial that it’s working on one? Well, Mark Zuckerberg has poked his head out of Facebook HQ to talk about the social network’s mobile plans. He sticks to the position that we’re not going to see a Facebook Phone anytime soon but keeps his options open. And it seems Facebook is planning to delve far deeper into Android that it ever has before…
After the social network’s blanket denial that it’s working on a Facebook Phone, Mark Zuckerberg’s chat with Techcrunch keeps things unsurprisingly vague. Keeping things ambiguous, he says: “When you get into the definition of what building a phone is, there are all these different things, which I think is the grey area…sometimes even people internally refer to stuff as ‘Facebook phones’.” You can see why people might get confused.
Mark Zuckerberg goes on to compare Facebook to the approach taken by Google and Apple in building the Nexus One and iPhone. He says if a Facebook Phone does ever arrive, that won’t be the route it’ll take: “There’s the Apple approach of really designing all the hardware…I’ll bet we’ll never do anything like that.”
But while he says a Facebook Phone isn’t on the cards in the near future, he leaves lots of room for manoeuvre: “10 years down the road, maybe we’ll build our own operating system…but for now I think, everything is going to be shades of integration rather than starting from the ground up.”
Talking about the original “Facebook phone” from INQ, Mark Zuckerberg reveals that Facebook engineers were not heavily involved in its development. However, he suggests Facebook is working hard on deeper Android integration that goes further than the kind of social layer offered by UI skins like HTC Sense.
We can’t help but feel a little sceptical about Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook phone denials. If the social network is working on projects that its employees call “Facebook phones”, that does suggest its mobile ambitions go a little bit further than building on Android or increasing the way the Facebook iPhone app integrates with iOS.
What do you make of Mark Zuckerberg’s response to the Facebook phone rumours? Is he pulling a “Steve Jobs” and indulging in a bit of misdirection or is the concept of a Facebook phone really just a tantalising tech myth?
Out TBC | £TBC | Facebook (via Techcrunch)
