Is the 'Facebook Phone' On Its Way?

Much buzzing ensued this weekend over the possibility of a “Facebook phone.” Bottom line? Not gonna happen—but that doesn’t mean we won’t see a “Facebook-branded, social-networking-focused Android phone” in the very near future, writes Dan Nosowitz on Fast Company. The story that started it all, over at TechCrunch, posited that Facebook is building a brand-new smartphone platform, but Facebook was quick to deny that report on Mashable.

Facebook’s denial was “cagey,” Nosowitz writes, but the original story’s “information is so vague as to be pretty much meaningless”—and anyway, the idea of Facebook building a mobile OS from the ground up “is incredibly unlikely.” What is likely—and what Facebook still allows for in its “denial”—is a Facebook-branded version of a phone that already exists: And “of all the major OSes, Android is the only one that can reasonably be modified, and, surprise surprise, Facebook hired away a Google veteran who also worked on Android.”
(More Facebook stories.)