Five Likely Features of the Facebook Phone
If you hold to the old motto that where there’s smoke, there’s a fire, then you’ll probably believe where there are technology blog rumours about Facebook making a phone there is a Zuckerberg plan, a device on the cards and probably a purpose-built factory in China.
It’s what I believe anyway. This is a quick round-up of the facts and five predictions for the Facebook phone.
Facebook Phone: 5 Probable Features
1) Deep social integration: Zuckerberg trotted out the integration phrase last night in an interview with Michael Arrington. He explained:
“On phones, we can do a single sign-on if we do a good integration with a phone, rather than just doing something where you go to an app and it’s automatically social or having to sign into each app individually. [..] Just make it so that you log into your phone once, and then everything that you do on your phone is social.”
“What does that mean though? will your phone send an update to Facebook when you send a text messsage? will we see things like this popping up in the news feed? – “John Smith has just spent 12 minutes on the phone with Jessica Simpson”. I don’t know, I guess Mark Zuckerberg does thoug.
2) Cheap. If rumours of a deal with manufacturers INQ are true this could be very cheap indeed. They are known for their budget, tween-friendly handsets.
3) An Android OS – maybe. Mark Zuckerberg also said that Facebook has no intention of making an operating system. So, I guess they’d probably use one of the existing platforms and Android is far and away the best open one going.
4) All apps would sync with Facebook. We’re envisaging things like the events calendar on Faceboook automatically merging with your phone calendar. Maps could automatically update places, Facebook messages would come in through email… Instant chat apps would run off Facebook Chat.
5) All phones could be Facebook phones. What Facebook are making might not be a phone at all but more a layer available across multiple handsets. A sort of user interface if you will. Remember back when Facebook introduced the Like Button and people predicted that they were trying to restructure the internet by making themselves the hub of people’s online experience? Sounds like they are trying to do this for mobile.
