Facebook Refutes HTC Phone Claims

Facebook has denied reports it is to launch a Facebook-branded mobile phone with Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC, claiming that the rumours have been “overblown”.

Speaking to journalists at a company event in London, Facebook’s head of business development Dan Rose flatly denied the rumour, originally published by London business newspaper City A.M., that HTC and Facebook would jointly launch phones at next month’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.

“This is really just another example of a manufacturer who has taken our public APIs (application programing interfaces) and integrated them into their device in an interesting way,” Rose explained.

Against Facebook’s principles

The City A.M. report suggested that HTC would unveil two new Facebook-branded mobile phones at next month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Rose said this would contradict one of the key principles of the Facebook platform – that it should be as broadly available as possible.

Despite this, mobile is an increasingly important aspect of Facebook’s growth strategy. The company claims that 250 million users per month access the social network on mobile devices, and has been working to improve its privacy controls and sign-on features in the latest updates to its mobile applications.

“As mobile devices have become more sophisticated and widespread, we’ve noticed that people are creating content and accessing Facebook at every moment of the day, in many locations — not just from desktops,” said Michael Eyal Sharon, mobile product manager at Facebook, back in August.

Accessing the social network using a mobile phone allows Facebook to deliver location-based services, such as Facebook Places, and context-specific advertising.

HTC was the maker of the first Google-branded phone, the Nexus One.