Facebook Phone: All You Need To Know + New Details
Of all the recent technology news, the one that's held most of my interest is the existence of the Facebook phone. Why? Because I'd been aware of a project to build a phone based on Facebook for quite some time, though I hadn't been able to confirm it from multiple sources.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Facebook phone remains officially unconfirmed — what exists is a persistent rumor, now fleshed out with new details, that Facebook is working with handset maker INQ Mobile on two smartphones built around deep social integration. What makes the rumor credible rather than idle is timing: Facebook sits at roughly 500 million users, its valuation is being publicly debated at $33 billion, and the company has said it hopes virtual [[a:none|Credits]] will become a significant dollar-generating revenue line.
The report lands in a busy stretch for Facebook — a special press event on social gaming earlier in the week, its worst outage in over four years days before, and growing scrutiny of how the service tracks user activity. A hardware play would be the company's biggest step yet from website toward platform.
First-order effects
- INQ Mobile, if the partnership is real, gets a flagship differentiator no other handset maker has — native Facebook integration at the OS level — while Facebook gains a guaranteed home-screen presence it cannot buy through apps alone.
Second-order effects
- Google and Apple would face pressure to loosen or deepen their own social hooks: an Android-based Facebook handset makes Google's relationship with its most valuable app developer awkward, since the phone's identity layer would sit above the OS.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — web platforms reaching down into handsets — smartphones shift from neutral app containers to branded identity devices, raising the question regulators and carriers will eventually have to answer about who owns the social graph on a phone.
The trend: Social platforms are moving up the value chain from apps on other companies' phones toward controlling the mobile experience itself, with hardware partnerships as the first step.