A Facebook Phone?

Rumour has it, there is a Facebook phone in the works. Currently, those rumours are being very quickly quashed by Facebook's PR people, so who are we to believe? You may remember that in the past, Google denied it was creating a phone and even Microsoft has also denied creating a phone - and yet, Android has quickly become a widely-known part of the smartphone market and Windows Phone 7 phones are starting to be released.What exactly does this mean if Facebook was to create a phone? Currently, Facebook has applications available on various smartphones, but despite their popularity they do lack some of the appeal that Facebook's web experience has, for example certain features are only available on the web version. If you are an avid user of these applications, you will notice they also don't run as fast as the web version, which admitted can be rather frustrating at times.If Facebook is not creating a phone, what could they possibly be creating? The applications which are used on smartphones are currently not created by Facebook - and that explains the lack of certain features on them. In fact, Facebook does not have its own mobile operating system - which does mean that they are in a sense controlled by the bigger fish in the technology world: Apple, Google and Microsoft. If Facebook was to create a proper mobile operating system it would soon regain its rights to distribution.As a comparison, think about Twitter and how it only released an official Twitter application earlier this year. Prior to this, Twitter was accessibly via different API platforms on various devices. It will shake things up, even if they are not creating a Facebook phone.It is probably best not to get our hopes up, as you may have heard about the Microsoft Kin - a social smartphone that remained quite tightly under wraps for a long time. The rumours were denied for so long that when it was actually released, no one really knew much about it.  And in only a few weeks of the launch, it has been scrapped and the Kin team has been moved to the Windows Phone 7 team instead. Let's hope that Facebook won't repeat Microsoft's mistakes.What do you think Facebook are going to create and release in the next f8 event?