The Facebook Phone

I had the same thought: the OP's venture between Vodafone and Facebook doesn't feel like the "Facebook phone" that has been rumored for a while… but who knows, Facebook doesn't make hardware so they probably don't have the same opportunities that Apple had and they probably want the maximum availability, even if half-assed. (I would think it's harder to completely screw up an experience around posting a status than around managing and syncing a music library)

r00fus• 15 years ago

I remember that the first "iTunes" phone was really a stalking horse by Apple to learn and understand the phone manufacturers and carriers... then they released the iPhone 2 years later which took over the world.

If this is the same type of move by Facebook, good on em... sometimes you learn best from failures.

rglover• 15 years ago

Considering this is supposed to be a Facebook supported phone, this thing looks like crap. Kind of a good idea, but with that sort of hardware and half-baked UI this is just as good as any other "social" phone that's come out in the past three years. Next.

nosequel• 15 years ago

“We hope to sell millions . . . Anything below millions will be disappointing.”

I think they will be disappointed. I can't name a smart phone where it takes more than about 2 keystrokes to do anything you want on Facebook.

ugh• 15 years ago

And those phones cost $100?

jackolas• 15 years ago

That and the Facebook application for Android is one of the worst apps out there.

andye• 15 years ago

^o^, I only remember this sentence after i read the article, and I laughed...

rjd3• 15 years ago

You have to remember price point and demographics. A lot people don't care for smart phones. Smart phones are only a fraction of the phone market as well.

Lots of people don't want smart phones for various reasons, lots of people buy them and then regret it like I did. The market is pretty varied.

I've gone back to my old Sony because of battery life. I kept forgetting to put my Android on charge every night, next day its flat. Totally worthless phone IMO, gave it away.

That said these types of gimmicks usually do fail pretty hard. So disappointment maybe ahead.

mirkules• 15 years ago

Rjd, my feeling is that you're in the minority. I don't have any numbers to back up my statement, and I think it's safe to say we are both speculating here. This is my reasoning:

Even if people don't want smartphones, I would speculate that people who want to be connected to Facebook ALSO want to be connected to other services: Twitter, Google+, etc. Tying a phone (with a contract life cycle of 24 months) to fickle online services with no room for expansion is a letdown waiting to happen. Just my $0.02.

Btw, when the iPhone first came out, battery life was a huge issue, which turned out to be a non-issue for the millions of iPhone owners. Most people have an extra cable in the car or office to charge it through the day. And those that didn't, didn't forget to charge it because they loved their iPhone so much. It was really quite fascinating to watch Apple shrug off the battery life issue so eloquently, which, unfortunately set the trend for shorter battery life (e.g. my coworker goes from 100% to 20% in 4 hours on his LG Revolution). I agree with you that this is pretty abysmal, but what can you do...?

d0ne• 15 years ago

The US version: http://www.htc.com/us/products/status-att

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

Any phone can be a Facebook phone.

dpapathanasiou• 15 years ago

This reminds me of the ESPN phone: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/07/21/bodenheimer-jobs

Cherian_Abraham• 15 years ago

Imagine a phone built purely for Facebook, which is built to their specs (low battery usage) and uses half the bandwidth of current smartphones when it comes to updating FB status, uploading pictures etc. Facebook could have a winner in a country like India, where bandwidth still sucks and there is a large FB user population.

A cheap subsidized phone, and maybe even with subsidized bandwidth usage (similar to Amazon Kindle and Sprint) built just for Facebook would be a killer. They could certainly grow their user population beyond a Billion, but the question is whether they could monetize on those users.

jojopotato• 15 years ago

Wasn't this what the Kin was supposed to be?

omn1• 15 years ago

It was clear they eventually team up with a phone company when they revealed the new messaging system in November of last year. This is a big step to further establish their platform.

That said I would have expected a device with a bigger display and less buttons. This looks like a business phone to manage your spare time.

I hope this is just a mockup of the homescreen as it features icons that look nearly the same (three icons that could mean "contacts" and two that could be for "messages"). Also browsing the web might not be a great experience.

I think they could have lowered the price tag and make browsing on Facebook free focusing more on ad revenue.

muratmutlu• 15 years ago

This isn't anymore a Facebook phone than the INQ stuff

The Facebook Phone

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