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Facebook phone isn’t on the way, but more advanced phone features are, Facebook says

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An official Facebook phone isn’t under development, but increased Facebook features on mobile phones are coming, the social media giant said Thursday morning.

‘Facebook is not building a mobile phone. As we’ve long said, our mobile strategy is to enable people to not only have access but also a great Facebook experience from any mobile phone they choose,’ a company spokesman said in an e-mail to the Technology blog.

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‘We’re working across the entire mobile industry with operators, hardware manufactures and app developers to bring Facebook to mobile phones in a variety of unique and exciting ways. Some of these include deep integrations of Facebook within the device, but are not ‘a Facebook phone’ as they sometimes are referred to by commenters.’

The Facebook phone rumor has been floating on the Web for months, and it reemerged this week with speculation that Facebook has teamed with HTC to develop a phone running a modified version of Google’s Android operating system that embeds Facebook into the OS of the phone itself.

The rumors, reported by multiple news agencies and tech-related Websites, indicated that the so-called Facebook phone would be unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month.

Reuters said Facebook’s head of business development, Dan Rose, told them no HTC phones with Facebook branding were on the way but that the rumors were likely based around other HTC handsets.

‘This is really just another example of a manufacturer who has taken our public APIs (application programming interfaces) and integrated them into their device in an interesting way,’ Rose told Reuters. ‘The rumors around there being something more to this HTC device are overblown.’

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

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