Facebook smartphone with HTC launching soon

Don't forget that Facebook owns Instagram as well. My non-tech friends (most of them) use exactly 2 apps regularly on their phones. Facebook and Instagram. I'm not sure any of them would jump at a Facebook branded phone, but I think a phone with Instagram in mind as the key feature (e.g. an awesome camera, integrated filters, not sure what else) might strike a chord with some of my friends.

EDIT: Almost forgot about Vine. That seemed to blow up in popularity in my demographic recently here in Hawaii. if Facebook owned Vine, they would have the holy trinity of apps.

We know that people don't like social login buttons because they believe using them will cause stuff to be posted on their behalf. I can imagine the same fear with buying a Facebook phone. "Jill just chatted with Tom, they discussed their sex life."

A big part of buying behavior for phones is the carrier retail outlets pushing the phones onto potential buyers.

Facebook, like Amazon, is a company deriving revenue from its ads and content (virtual currency, etc). They could afford to sell the phones to carriers "at cost", at which point the carriers will have a HUGE incentive to sell the phones. Now of course, if they sell at 0 margin to the carriers, HTC won't be happy. But HTC is not doing well at all in terms of phone sales, and perhaps they'd be willing to sell the phone to carriers at very low margins (kind of like how LG, lagging in sales and design inspiration, partnered up with Google and sold a device, the Nexus 4, for very very cheap).

In such a case, FB phones could actually sell a decent amount.

I honestly don't know anyone who actually likes Facebook. My group of friends and I continue to use it because there just isn't any better way for us to stay in touch at scale on a day-to-day basis, and nobody really cares enough to put up with the fragmentation that moving to a different network would cause. So it's in this weird middle ground of being too important to give up outright, but not important enough to bother actually fixing.

I was thinking this exactly. This actually looks like an April Fool's headline/article.

From this article they still aren't doing a phone. HTC are doing a phone and Facebook is partnering with them to run a forked version of Android on it, which will obviously be integrated nicely with Facebook.

They can't sell devices that use an android-derived OS that isn't android compatible. As long as the phone could still run arbitrary APKs without modification, they're still within the terms of the OHA, and HTC can continue to sell official android devices. You can skin it up so it is unrecognizable, and you can lock it down so it only runs your App Store, you just can't change the fundamentals.

The trouble aliyun/acer ran into a while back was because aliyun actually changed the API, so that it couldn't run android apps. I can't imagine why Ali would have done that, and I can't imagine any reason why Facebook would purposefully cut themselves off from the android ecosystem. I'm sure HTC won't be running afoul of the OHA with this.

Facebook has been known to partner with Microsoft. It's possible that the phone will be full of Bing.

On the other hand, Microsoft is trying to promote their own phone OS, and this phone is clearly DOA if it doesn't run Android apps, but I can't see Microsoft liking the idea of promoting the Android ecosystem.

It's kind of funny actually. You could see how it could make sense for Microsoft and Facebook to work together and create some Facebook Phone running WP8, except they each probably think the other is going to fail and don't want to board a sinking ship.

I'm pretty sure they (Facebook) will lose the ability to call this an "Android" phone - and clearly they won't be entitled to the Google Suite of apps.

Further than that... I don't think there are any repercussions.

get the average person to care?

currently anyone in the world on pretty much ANY device can access, register an account, and connect fast and easy to their nearby friends on Facebook. The FB philosophy is to "make the world more open and connected" , not "help connect relatively wealthy, tech oriented people." Diaspora has a number of <i> significant </i> hurdles it needs to tackle to just be in the conversation:

1) Ease of access from any device -- can some rando in Egypt open up a 'dumb' phone, sign into his account, and enter the political discourse relatively easily? Twitter is getting there on this account, and it's why Twitter is in the conversation.

2) Scale -- currently everyone and their mom (and dad, grandparents, cousins, long-distant alumni friends, etc.) is on Facebook. For a social network to "replace Facebook" in your words, their needs to be a solid value proposition over Facebook that causes huge droves of people to move away or switch. Currently there's little -- maybe privacy controls could be easier to use, but Zuck himself said that users control their data already: "Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with." Other than that -- why would the average person put in the "activation energy" over inertia to switch, other than "it's shiny and cool?"

In all Diaspora is an interesting project, but it has little differentiating value prop

Maybe a combination of both?

According to TechCrunch the press invitation says "Come see our new home on Android"; if they were to take Amazon's approach I would expect them to omit mentioning Android completely, so I guess this tells something.

"This will be a deeper, forked version of Android rather than a Facebook-ified version of Sense."

>Will be interesting to see how Google reacts...

I hope they don't come up with the dumb idea to create a Google+ phone. People tend make irrational decisions when confronted with uncertainty.

how so?

Sure, because when I need information, I think "I'll Facebook it". rolls eyes

Oh look, a third time in as many days that I think new accounts should be read-only.