Is this Facebook phone likely?
A slick Facebook phone concept has surfaced but it's of dubious usefulness.
The world may not be ready for another Facebook-flavored smartphone, but that hasn't stopped designer Michal Bonikowski from dreaming one up.
Ubergizmo reports that Mr. Bonikowski has imagined his own take on a handset targeted at Facebook addicts. Judging from the pictures posted by the tech Web site, unlike HTC's ill-fated Status phone, this fantastic device sports a big 4.2-inch display.
It's also painted Facebook blue and has a distinctively HTC-esque aesthetic complete with a flat slab of a body with softly blunted edges. The handset even flaunts a unibody metal chassis like the HTC One S and HTC One V.
Made to be an ultra-communicator, Mr. Bonikowski envisions the phone to have an 8-megapixel main camera plus a high-resolution 5-megapixel front-facing camera for sharp video chats too. It's certainly a far cry from the HTC Status (aka Cha Cha), which was tiny, plastic, and had both a painfully tiny screen and physical keyboard.
But is there any demand for a Facebook-centered gadget like this? If Facebook's weak stock performance is any judge, perhaps not. I feel that if a Zuckerberg sanctioned mobile gadget is to succeed, it better take a page from the Nokia Lumia 900's playbook and be very aggressively priced.
In any case I think that this is the wrong direction for smartphones to go. I'd rather pay a little more for a higher degree of functionality. Image a phone that you could effortlessly flip from pure stock Android over to a manufacturer's best software interface (Sense, Touchwiz, what have you) at will without any data loss or warranty headaches. Now that's a smartphone worth dreaming about.