Jenna Wortham/The New York Times INQ’s Cloud Touch Facebook phones.Update 6:50 pm: Facebook says dozens of new phones this year will be built around its social network
BARCELONA, Spain — Mark Zuckerberg has long insisted that he has no plans to bring an official Facebook-branded phone to the market. But handset makers are getting that ball rolling, even without him.
On Tuesday, during a press event at the Mobile World Congress here, HTC unveiled two devices, the ChaCha and the Salsa, that incorporate Facebook features directly into the user interface of the phone. And INQ Mobile, a small telecom company in London, showed off its own Facebook-centric devices.
“Facebook is really more than a social network,” said Frank Meehan, the founder and chief executive of INQ Mobile. His company has developed two Facebook phones, one with a keyboard, called the Cloud Q, and one with a touch screen, the Cloud Touch.
The phones cost from $200 to $230 unlocked and run $50 to $75 with a two-year contract with a wireless company. They will be available almost everywhere, including in Europe, Canada and Australia, but not the United States. Mr. Meehan was optimistic that the devices would be available stateside later this year.
“We’re trying to do more than mash Facebook and Android up,” he said. “We’re using Facebook to create mobile apps on a device.”
The phones, which run on the Android system, break out popular Facebook features — messaging, chat, status updates — into their own applications that sit alongside the Web browser and maps features. In addition, the phone has a visual news feed scrolling across the top of the screen that shows the latest updates from your network. But it doesn’t pull in data from the hundreds of people in your virtual contact list. Instead, it uses Facebook’s Social Graph API to surface photos, videos, links and status updates from the people you interact with the most on the site.
“When Facebook made that graph available, it was an auto-upgrade for us,” Mr. Meehan said.
The experience of using these phones is certainly more natural and seamless than using the Facebook applications on iPhone and Android devices. Readers, what do you think? Would you ever want to use a Facebook phone?
Update: In a posting on its site, Facebook said that in addition to the phones showcased in Barcelona, dozens of new devices this year will be built around its service.
“Some manufacturers will be highlighting Facebook as a part of their phones’ on-screen interfaces, and others will use our brand as an element of the device hardware itself,” wrote Charles Wu, a Facebook engineer. “We believe almost anything is better when it’s social, and this year we’ll continue to invest in new technologies so you have a great Facebook experience no matter where you go.”