HTC to produce exclusive Facebook smartphone, bitch
Wall flower?
Talk of a Facebook phone resurfaced today amid familiar rumours that the Zuckerberg-owned firm has joined forces with phone-maker HTC to produce an Android handset heavily customised for social networkers.
The jointly-developed smartphone is expected to launch in Q3 2012 at the earliest, unnamed "industry sources" say, DigiTimes reports.
Unlike the HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa, which both featured Facecrack integration, the latest will apparently sport its own platform exclusive to the site. This should see even deeper fusion and custom social networking functionality brought to the device.
Time for a ChaCha-change?
Rumours of such a handset have been floating around for years, with talk of a Facebook phone first doing the rounds in 2010.
While the newest whispers could turn out to be just as weightless, now with almost a billion users, Facebook certainly has a fair few punters it could poke into picking one up. ®
COMMENTS
I hate these baked in apps
I have an HTC Desire which has a Facebook app baked in. It must eat up 5MB of space at least. If that weren't bad enough it's out of date and semi functional so if I want a working Facebook I need to download another Facebook which masks out the first but does not recover the space it uses up.
The phone also has a crappy Twitter client baked in and some other crapware. Unlike regular crapware you cannot remove it.
I wish phone manufacturers would get it through their thick heads that this value add shit should not be baked into the firmware. By all means preinstall but allow people to uninstall it if they don't need it.
Alternatively they could just fix the shitty facebook apps so they actually work. Why is FB so much easier and faster to use using a web browser on a phone than the official app?
Urrgh
Already hugely annoyed after both the FB and Twitter programs on my phone decided to munge all their data into my phone book contacts, without asking, and with no way to undo. I should have listened to my brain and continued to use their respective mobile websites instead of trying out the native Android programs that single fateful time.
Having said that, I was tempted by the HTC Chachaaahacchccaahhaa. Well, I was tempted until I read the review on here saying it was total pants. I'm done with these massive touchscreen devices with no physical buttons. Messaging and e-mailing is so much easier on my work Blackberry, plus way better battery life than the 1-2 days I get from my HTC Desire (when it spends most of the day sat in my jacket pocket). If I could stick Android (well CyanogenMod) on a Blackberry then that would be immense.
Windows Phone?
As a former HTC Windows Phone user, I can honestly say that the only REALLY well done part was it's Facebook integration. Great for a personal phone but on my business device, it wasn't really great during meetings getting updates telling me that "Scott has just had his scrotum pierced".
Root your phone you dunce and you can then remove the shitty baked in apps.
