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Report claims Facebook working on two Android handsets with INQ

Stuart Dredge
Report claims Facebook working on two Android handsets with INQ

But CEO Mark Zuckerberg is keen to keep existing partnerships.

Rumours about Facebook's mobile ambitions continue to sizzle, with a Bloomberg report claiming that the company is working with INQ on two social-focused handsets.

It suggests that both phones will run the Android OS, and will go on sale in Europe in the first half of 2011, before making their US debuts later in the year.

AT&T has been fingered as the potential carrier partner in the US for the devices, one of which will be touchscreen-only, while the other will include a QWERTY keyboard.

"We’ve been working with INQ for a couple of years now to help them build a deeply integrated Facebook experience on their devices," says a Facebook spokesperson.

"While we can’t speak for their future product development plans, we can say that our view is that almost all experiences would be better if they were social."

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Facebook bluntly denied that it's building a 'Facebook Phone' this weekend, in response to speculation. As we noted at the time, the language in that denial left clear wiggle-room for someone else - namely INQ - to be building such a handset.

Bloomberg's report was published almost simultaneously with a long interview on TechCrunch - the blog that broke the original rumour last weekend - with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

"Our whole strategy is not to build any specific device or integration or anything like that, because we're not trying to compete with Apple or the Droid or any other hardware manufacturer for that matter," he said.

"Our strategy is very horizontal. We’re trying to build a social layer for everything. Basically we’re trying to make it so that every app everywhere can be social whether it’s on the web, or mobile, or other devices."

The full interview is essential reading: it's in Q&A format, with long, fully-transcribed answers from Zuckerberg setting out how Facebook sees mobile.

It's clear that the company is walking a balancing act though, between deep integration with phones made by the likes of INQ on one hand, and alienating bigger platform owners on the other.

"If all of the people that are our partners, who are the main people that we’re trying to work with to make everything social, think that we’re trying to compete with them, that makes them not want to work with us," admitted Zuckerberg.

Tags: facebook , inq