Facebook iPad app on route; phone not being developed

Facebook is pretty much in the news cycle constantly, but rarely does it cross our desks as Mac news. Over the weekend, however, there was some interesting rumours floating around that we thought we should address and debunk at the same time.

First, FaceBook’s iPhone application hasn’t been ported to the iPad just yet. Instead, most of us have been using their mobile website, or worse, the iPhone application. While the functionality is still there, not having an iPad optimized application is starting to get irksome for some. So it comes with some hope that Cyril Moutran, co-founder of Oecoway and developer of an unofficial Facebook for iPad application, isn’t yanking our chain a little—FaceBook is working on an iPad app.

That’s great news.

Facebook’s working on a phone? Say what?

This rumour was debunked by Facebook, as fast as it came up in our RSS reader. But first, here’s the rumour, in case you missed the second half of the news that came along with this “breaking” story yesterday. CNET reported that Facebook had reached out to a bunch of hardware manufacturers t to gather some information about the possibility of a Facebook-branded device. On top of that, Business Insider also had a source saying that Facebook is planning on using Google’s Android OS for the device.

The rumour lasted all of an hour before Facebook denied it. They had this to say: “The story is not accurate…Our approach has always been to make all phones and apps more social, not build a phone. The bottom line is that whenever we work on a deep integration, people want to call it a “Facebook Phone” (even internally) because that’s such an attractive sound bite, but our real strategy is to make everything social and not build one phone or integration.” It makes sense that they’d deny it, and we’re not 100 percent sold on the fact that they’re not remotely kicking tires about the possibility of bringing a Facebook phone to the masses. But, at the very least, it sounds like they might be bringing an interesting product to Android.

Article Via iPad in Canada and PC World

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.