By Beatrice Jeschek

Facebook co-founder and CEO Marc Zuckerberg sees the future in the mobile market. "In a few years" mobile phones would be "even more important than the web", he admitted in a massive interview with TechCrunch (4.500 words). Heavy rumours say he could be building his own mobile phone.

Michael Arrington, chief of the acclaimed technology blog TechChrunch, claimed a few days ago that Facebook worked on building its own mobile phone like Apple and Google have done it previously.

Arrington refused to reveal his source and Facebook denied the whole thing, if not unequivocally. Zuckerberg tried to clear the air in an interview with TechCrunch:

"Our goal is not to build an operating system [...] or [...] design hardware from scratch. Our goal is to make it so that we can design the best integrations in the widest variety of phones. [...] I mean, who knows, 10 years down the road, maybe we'll build our own operating system [...]."

It seems to depend on the definition of "building a phone": "Own operating system"? Not yet. "Shades of integration"? Yes.

Zuckerberg appeared to be unhappy about the Facebook mobile rumours, as he wished to work as closely as possible with all mobile platforms instead of competing with them, at least for now. Obviously, if Apple or Google, among others, would think Facebook was building their own mobile phone they would refuse to work with them, he added.

"If I knew who leaked it to you, I would've fire them already", Zuckerberg told TechCrunch.

Bloomberg, however, put Facebook's strategy on mobile phones into a more concrete title:

"Facebook said to be working on phones with partner INQ for AT&T"

Two smartphones would be the goal, due to be introduced in Europe the first half of 2011, and in competition with the iPhone and the BlackBerry. One of the things unclear, according to Bloomberg, was whether the name "Facebook" would appear on the smartphones themselves.

(True or not, here is an already existing satirical photoshopped suggestion of what the Facebook mobile phone could look like from Sean Percival's Blog):


This article was first published 24/09/2010 on maltastar.com.