

The Facebook Phone - drpancake
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/8ead4e1a-b86b-11e0-b62b-00144feabdc0.html

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nosequel
“We hope to sell millions . . . Anything below millions will be
disappointing.”

I think they will be disappointed. I can't name a smart phone where it takes
more than about 2 keystrokes to do anything you want on Facebook.

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rjd
You have to remember price point and demographics. A lot people don't care for
smart phones. Smart phones are only a fraction of the phone market as well.

Lots of people don't want smart phones for various reasons, lots of people buy
them and then regret it like I did. The market is pretty varied.

I've gone back to my old Sony because of battery life. I kept forgetting to
put my Android on charge every night, next day its flat. Totally worthless
phone IMO, gave it away.

That said these types of gimmicks usually do fail pretty hard. So
disappointment maybe ahead.

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mirkules
Rjd, my feeling is that you're in the minority. I don't have any numbers to
back up my statement, and I think it's safe to say we are both speculating
here. This is my reasoning:

Even if people don't want smartphones, I would speculate that people who want
to be connected to Facebook ALSO want to be connected to other services:
Twitter, Google+, etc. Tying a phone (with a contract life cycle of 24 months)
to fickle online services with no room for expansion is a letdown waiting to
happen. Just my $0.02.

Btw, when the iPhone first came out, battery life was a huge issue, which
turned out to be a non-issue for the millions of iPhone owners. Most people
have an extra cable in the car or office to charge it through the day. And
those that didn't, didn't forget to charge it because they loved their iPhone
so much. It was really quite fascinating to watch Apple shrug off the battery
life issue so eloquently, which, unfortunately set the trend for shorter
battery life (e.g. my coworker goes from 100% to 20% in 4 hours on his LG
Revolution). I agree with you that this is pretty abysmal, but what can you
do...?

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rjd
Tech crunch says the figures are 28% phones, hence standard phones = 67%. I
agree its changing, but I'm not sure how much is forced and how much is
through real consumer decision making... you'd need to be a manufacture or a
carrier insider to answer that one...

I know I'm an extremely impatient person, which means I loose my cool over
things like battery life. That impatience usually does make me a minority as I
reject half arsed products (sometimes to early). I'm also very busy, and
things like worrying about cell phone battery life are really low on my
priority list, often I'm only aware when I get the warning beeps while having
a conversation. Having to actively worry about my phone ... when others I
don't... makes it a useless product to me, it needs to do its job and not make
my life more difficult.

But I can't help looking at the reported 40% return rate for android phones
and start to think there is a problem there... and maybe theres multiple
issues going on, battery issues maybe for some, carrier apps yo can't delete
reported in other threads here, warranty issues, standard Android UI/usability
issues no one has ever fixed.

Then theres reports of weird java versions especially compiled for unique
chips that aren't library complete/compatible... meaning apps aren't portable.
Carriers and manufacturers refusing to supply upgraded firmware, and voiding
your warranty if you do it yourself.

Its a real mess, and people are complaining and advising people not to buy
them. I advised both my parents to hold out for the iPhone 5 because of this,
I've heard a few Android owners I work with regretting the purchases.

Anway I'm prepared to accept I'm wrong ;)

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rjd
Vodafones product page for it:
[http://www.vodafone.com/content/index/about/what/devices/vod...](http://www.vodafone.com/content/index/about/what/devices/vodafone_555blue.html#overview)

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schrototo
Seems like a pretty half-assed product. "Vodafone 555 Blue", really, that's
what you're gonna call it?

Anyone remember the Motorola ROKR? Yeah, exactly...

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r00fus
I remember that the first "iTunes" phone was really a stalking horse by Apple
to learn and understand the phone manufacturers and carriers... then they
released the iPhone 2 years later which took over the world.

If this is the same type of move by Facebook, good on em... sometimes you
learn best from failures.

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omn1
It was clear they eventually team up with a phone company when they revealed
the new messaging system in November of last year. This is a big step to
further establish their platform.

That said I would have expected a device with a bigger display and less
buttons. This looks like a business phone to manage your spare time.

I hope this is just a mockup of the homescreen as it features icons that look
nearly the same (three icons that could mean "contacts" and two that could be
for "messages"). Also browsing the web might not be a great experience.

I think they could have lowered the price tag and make browsing on Facebook
free focusing more on ad revenue.

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Cherian_Abraham
Imagine a phone built purely for Facebook, which is built to their specs (low
battery usage) and uses half the bandwidth of current smartphones when it
comes to updating FB status, uploading pictures etc. Facebook could have a
winner in a country like India, where bandwidth still sucks and there is a
large FB user population.

A cheap subsidized phone, and maybe even with subsidized bandwidth usage
(similar to Amazon Kindle and Sprint) built just for Facebook would be a
killer. They could certainly grow their user population beyond a Billion, but
the question is whether they could monetize on those users.

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jojopotato
Wasn't this what the Kin was supposed to be?

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d0ne
The US version: <http://www.htc.com/us/products/status-att>

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dpapathanasiou
This reminds me of the ESPN phone:
<http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/07/21/bodenheimer-jobs>

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muratmutlu
This isn't anymore a Facebook phone than the INQ stuff

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nextparadigms
Any phone can be a Facebook phone.

