If this is the actual phone it sure is UGLY!
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Reports about a Facebook phone have resurfaced recently, but it seems everyone has forgotten about the Facebook phone nobody wanted.
The web has been buzzing about the rumor of a Facebook phone, that will change social networking as we know it. Codenamed “Buffy”, which instills a huge amount of confidence in the calibre of the product, the phone will make everyone’s life better at the touch of a button.
While some have raised well-placed privacy concerns about having Facebook in your pocket, the fact is this has been done before and nobody cared. Do you remember the HTC Chacha? How about the AT&T branded version of it, the HTC Status? I didn’t think so.
This was an unofficial, meaning HTC/AT&T couldn’t actually call it a Facebook phone, phone that had Facebook ingrained all the way down to the hardware layer. You could see the Facebook button right on the front of the phone, that made it a snap, er, push of a button, to share anything around you. Both AT&T and HTC made a big splash about the Status/Chacha, calling it the first Facebook phone on the AT&T network. It was positioned to change our world, and for the better. After all, sharing is good, right?
This was earlier this year, and since then the Facebook phone has made no impact. No. Noise. At. All. It’s as if it quietly went into hiding in the back rooms of stores. I’m sure some of them sold to customers, but I certainly haven’t seen a single one in the real world.
If Facebook is really developing Buffy, or whatever it will eventually call the real Facebook phone, it is likely to receive the same reception as the “nobody owns one” Chacha. The fact is Facebook is too late to bring such a phone to market successfully, as every single Facebook user already has decent access to the service on their present phone. It doesn’t matter what phone they use, Facebook is already front and center for those who consider that important.
Facebook phone? Nobody outside of the Facebook organization cares.