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Facebook Said To Be Developing Phone With HTC
ProbablyJoe writes "AllThingsD is running a series of stories this week about a possible new Facebook phone, codenamed 'Buffy.' The phone is said to be in development by HTC, who collaborated with Facebook earlier this year for the Salsa and ChaCha/Status phones, which both had physical Facebook buttons, and a degree of integration with the social network. While these rumors have been going around for quite a while, the article contains some new information, and neither Facebook or HTC are denying the rumors. The phone will be based on Android, but like Amazon's Kindle Fire, will be heavily modified to integrate with Facebook, potentially using Facebook's HTML5 platform.
While we're unlikely to see any official announcements or releases any time soon, Facebook are eager to compete with Google and Apple, and are likely to want a phone of their own on shelves as soon as possible."
Oh neat.
Two of the most privacy-destroying forces joined together!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It's HTC with facebook, not congress with facebook.
With Buffy, though, the integration will go much deeper, bringing friends and social activities deep into the mobile interface.
Is this supposed to be a sexual joke or is this article just terribly written?
I'm looking forward to having a private conversation with my doctor or lawyer posted into all my friends voicemail boxes due to an unannounced "improvement" in the phone's security profiles.
Looking at the picture illustrating the article and knowing that the main design aim of Facebook was to spy on Mark's ex-girlfriends (and never-have-been-girlfriends), I guess that your idea of bad writing is just wishful thinking.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Everything you will ever do in the future will be recorded, analyzed and measured. The data will be sold. You will get lots of advertisements that you cannot block. Oh, and the phone will be illegal in Europe.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I just don't see this working out for well for Facebook. History is littered with examples of successful software companies that thought their brilliance extended to hardware. It almost never works out; they inevitably rediscover not only that hardware is an order of magnitude more challenging to get to market than software, but customers are much less forgiving about flaws and bugs when they can't be fixed with a simple update.
But in this case especially, I don't understand what kind of core assets Facebook can leverage on their own device that they're not getting elsewhere. With Google at least it made sense that they didn't want their search platform ignored amidst a sea of apps (though in many ways the world is still going that way, even on Android). But what exactly can a "Facebook phone" offer that an iOS/Android device with the Facebook app can't?
Clearly they think they have an answer to that question, or at least they're worried enough about the diluted (and deluded, for that matter) social network landscape to make themselves believe they've found one.
Why does this look like a doomed project from the begining? In the age of touch screens, a button? really. My current phone has the facebook app, email, text messages, web browser and address book that already integrate with facebook. What more is there?
I wouldn't have thought that releasing an Android phone counts as competing with Google. It may be heavily modified for Facebook usage, but somewhere along the line, Google will still be making money from it, yes?.
Sarah Michelle Gellar bent over a table showing cleavage, holding a Facebook phone with a graphic of dripping blood ... definitely sexual, likely not a joke ... just trying to figure out who the metaphorical Vampire is in this one.
I wonder if that's an 'official' Facebook phone photo, or something the site did in photoshop.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
ball troll best troll
Does it slays vampires??
There are several social networking phones in the works- not just the facebook phone.
Facebook Phone: Invites people to talk to you that you didn't call.
iGoogle Phone: Built in GPS drives you in circles.
Despora Phone: Offers greater security but you need to wait a year after placing the call for the call to go through.
Twitter Phone: Phone only lets you speak a sentence per call and lets anyone hear.
MySpace Phone: No one uses this phone and all phone calls get talked over by "male-enhancement" ads.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Do not want!!
(not that a big majority of the population won't want this)
Damn, I'm going to actually read this article now!
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Is it like this?
Well, you can buy that now.
And this winter, we read that there is not only a Facebook phone coming (albeit no sign of this particular one yet), but there's more than one.
Hey, when do we get new news, huh?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Nope, just stared at the pic, and saved it.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
just trying to figure out who the metaphorical Vampire is in this one
Yeah, my first thought before I even saw the graphic was, "Why would a vampire want to name a phone after someone who's going to kill it?"
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Kristy Swanson bent over a table showing cleavage, holding a Facebook phone with a graphic of dripping blood ... definitely sexual, likely not a joke ...
Fixed it for you.
Really now? Facebook are eager to compete?
Is we educated in English here too?
Seriously? How many times has Facebook made a "change" and the whole community freaked out over it? People continue to use Facebook because it's free, but if one has to pay for a product they may not go for it given Facebook's past development practices. In addition, Facebook's mobile site doesn't even work half the time and they obviously don't test code before putting it into production on their mobile or full site.
Good luck, Facebook. This may be your end.
AllThingsD has a series of articles on this where they talk about the multiple attempts of a Facebook phone. They investigated creating a phone from scratch (hardware/software/distribution/carriers/etc.) and eventually gave up. The newest attempt is the one that's leaking out now with HTML5 Facebook layer on top of Android with HTC building the hardware.
My company home page
Really? I'm pretty sure this is Sarah Michelle Gellar ... but, I'm willing to entertain the fact that I can't tell the difference between two skinny blondes. :-P
I only knew the TV series ... and even that only a little. To me, that looks like Sarah Michelle Gellar. That, of course, doesn't make me correct. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I do not care to to have some "dumb fuck" adding my name and number to a device integrated with Zuckerburgs privacy invading platform.
Maybe they should instead focus on fixing their piece of crap existing mobile apps first. I can only really speak to the Android app although I've read in the past that the iPhone version has lots of complaints, too. To say the Android Facebook app is completely awful in every way is putting it too nicely. A few revisions back they did away with the native feel altogether; now the feed appears to be some sort of embedded web view into the mobile website. It is slow to scroll, doesn't always register clicks correctly (because you're clicking on hyperlinks instead of click areas), and will randomly change at Facebook's whim. There's a weird refresh/scrolling glitch where you scroll down and suddenly the "updating" graphic shows at the top and the screen clips and jumps. Other times there's a refresh bug where it will just constantly refresh - you'll scroll down through the feed and it will jump to the top repeatedly until you exit out and back in.
There are UI inconsistencies all over the place. There's the main newsfeed which is the crappy web view. Going to a profile brings up the old native UI. Sometimes clicking through something (still within the Facebook realm) drops you to the mobile site instead. Tagging people works sometimes, sometimes it doesn't. It's always been slow in general - half the time images won't load correctly, or start loading and then stop, and they are always slow to work with anyway. It's a mess.
I really just want to be able to follow the newsfeed in a fast reliable manner and have the same basic features as the main site. But in a native app - HTML5 may be the future but it doesn't give the same experience as the native UIs. As big as Facebook is and I assume a lot of people use their mobile apps, but it completely falls down compared to what Google has done with their Google+ app. I think the mobile app space will be the downfall of Facebook - the harder it becomes to use their mobile apps the less I'm likely to use it and instead focus on other social networks.
Have no fear, your ability to tell the difference between skinny blondes is quite functional. That is Sarah Michelle Gellar. I think need4mospd is a Buffy purist that believes only the movie with Kristy Swanson matters.
Thought it said: "Facebook Sad To Be Developing Phone With HTC"
If they want the slashdot nerds to go for this phone it needs Natalie Portman bent over a table showing cleavage, holding a Facebook phone with a graphic of hot grits.
Didn't they already do this?
And wasn't that phone, well... crap?
HTC Chacha, it already happened.
My blood hurts...
Nope, just stared at the pic, and saved it.
I've never heard it called that before.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
...Will not end well for Facebook. I can say with a degree of certainty that most FB users have not said "You know... I wish I had a phone that was like Facebook. One that can expose all my secrets and intimate moments for all the world to see without my consent! I never liked privacy anyways!"