The 'Facebook phone' lands on Thursday – but are you really that interested?

In a couple of days time Facebook has a press event in the US where it has invited journalists to ‘Come see our new Home on Android.’

However if you were expecting a minor tweak or two to its Google app, forget it. The gossip is that this is something much bigger.

Rumours of Facebook phone have been buzzing for years now and on Thursday it seems like we will finally (sort of ) get it. We may also get a Facebook skin that you can download as your home screen.

Several sites, most notably this one, are running with the story that Facebook will unveil a HTC handset called the Myst, which will be running a tweaked version of Android 4.1.2 (Jelly Bean). The big change is that Facebook will be totally integrated into the handset so that when you switch the phone on the first thing it does is log you in.

There’s also a Facebook powered home screen which will at the very least give you notifications as well as displaying contacts that you can now make voice calls too using Facebook Messenger.

The Myst phone apparently sports a 4.3inch screen, 1.5Ghz processor, 1GB RAM and packs a five mega pixel camera too.

The big question is whether you will be able to download a version of the new tweak and install it on your Android phone. Also will it work with any Android OS, or just Jelly Bean?

So what do you think? Surely the upgrade will be available across all Android handsets – well Jelly Bean ones at least. And as for the phone I am not sure how many people are going to be tempted into buying a mid-range HTC handset purely on the strength of being able to access a Facebook skin/launcher – especially if they can get that via the Google Play store anyhow.

Well, we will find out soon enough.