Rumor: HTC Opera UL is the official Facebook phone Zuckerberg said “didn’t make sense”

There’s been a lot of back and forth during the last few months about an upcoming official Facebook phone, which seemed very likely one day only for rumors to be crushed the next. One of the most consistent speculations was that FB was working with HTC at the manufacturing of the device, although we even heard that the social networking giant might take upon itself to build the handheld from scratch.
But then Mark Zuckerberg came and denied everything (more than once), saying even that “building out a whole phone really wouldn’t make much sense for us to do”. And that’s despite the company’s main future focus said to be on mobile. So, case closed, right?

Well, not so fast, because Pocket-Lint now claims to have heard from a “very reliable source in Taiwan”, who’s confirmed not only that a Facebook phone exists, but also its identity. This is said to be the same mysterious HTC Operaul that leaked last week, although the working name is Opera UL after all.
That’s not all the “reliable source” has “confirmed”, because it seems that the social network’s OEM product has been already delayed. Now we don’t know when the phone was supposed to be released in the first place, so this delay doesn’t mean much to us, but, if we take this rumor and add it to previous ones, we can speculate that the Opera UL will not see the light of day by mid-2013.


But if the phone were to come, say, next summer wouldn’t it be a bit too late to make an impression? I mean, we know from that leaked benchmark that the display will be a 1280 x 720 pix res one, while the dual-core processor will be clocked at 1.4 GHz.
That doesn’t exactly sound like the absolute best hardware configuration today, so in six or nine months from now it’ll probably be the definition of mid-range. And is mid-range really how Facebook wants to get in this ruthless game?
We don’t really know what FB is planning – especially with Zuckerberg being such a sneaky devil – so we should probably wait and see how will the “Facebook phone, made for Facebook” turn out. And before anything, we should wait to hear on the veracity of this rumor.
After all, even if the whole thing proves to be true and the phone will only be a mid-ranger, at least FB gave up that terrible idea of building the handheld from scratch and reached out to HTC. How bad can it be, right?

SOURCES Pocket-Lint

Android themes Android tablet themes
What is the best tablet best ipad games iphone themes