HTC Facebook Phone Incoming Again….Do You Care?
Facebook Phone Concept Image
Another facebook phone is on the way from HTC according to a Bloomberg report that is fast spreading across the interwebs. Bloomberg is citing a person close to the situation as their source. This is obviously facebooks attempt at leveraging the fast increasing mobile usage of the platform, and there is speculation that Zuck and co. see this as a way to make some advertising money on mobile, something they don’t appear to have a strategy for up to this point. The phone is expected to hit some time in the middle of next year. Facebook has made several hires recently that have been specific to the forthcoming device including: Greg Novick, who helped develop the touch-screen user interface; Tim Omernick and Chris Tremblay, (software) and Scott Goodson, who reportedly worked on a stock market application for the device. Also of note is the Push Pop Press acquisition founded by Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris these names may sound familiar to you because these guys worked on the look and the feel of the ios software running on Apple’s iPad and iPhone. Push Pop Press is a digital publishing company and this has to be very important, central even, to the social networks mobile efforts. Facebook is uniquely positioned when it comes to content consumption I mean face it, a lot of media is consumed on the social network each day. This makes one think HTC may be a bit desperate, with three straight quarters of loss and a 42% decline in it’s stock value, and facebook is equally desperate to get an edge in mobile advertising pretty much dominated by you know who. The phone will probably be packing a heavily modified version of Android, much like Amazon’s offerings, instead of the glorified share button on the previous facebook phone efforts which were fail. Do you think this project will go anywhere? Do the previous failures demand that HTC and facebook take a different approach and create some sort of Android based facebook OS? Do you even care? We’ll see how this pans out. You can read the full report from Bloomberg at the source link below.
