No, we're not coming up with a Facebook phone: Zuckerberg

When Facebook reported its Q2 earnings  since the social media giant was listed as a public company, the results were a disappointment as the company just about managed to live up to Wall Street expectations, and showed a revenue increase of around 32 percent in the second quarter to $1.18 billion, in line with average forecasts. Wall Street was of course hoping for more and Facebook’s shares tumbled to their lowest ever below $24. So what is Facebook’s future strategy going to be centred around? Well, its all mobile, mobile for Facebook. In the earnings call however, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it abundantly clear that while mobile was the way forward for Facebook, an FB smartphone was not on the cards. [caption id=“attachment_393239” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. AP[/caption] When asked about how he intended to monetize mobile, Zuckerberg said, “There are a lot of things that you can build in other operating systems as well that aren’t really taking — that aren’t really like building out a whole phone, which I think wouldn’t really makes much sense for us to do.” Zuckerberg’s statement thus puts an end to all those pesky rumours of a Facebook mobile phone that have been doing the rounds, like those in this Bloomberg report, which stated that HTC and Facebook were planning to launch a special smartphone by mid-2013. Zuckerberg also said that, he expects that “over the next 5 years, 4 billion to 5 billion people will have smartphones. That’s more than twice as many people that have computers today.” “We don’t just want to have the most widely used mobile apps, though. We want to build the best apps and we also want to build experiences that are deeply integrated as possible into every device and mobile app that people use. We’re investing very heavily in improving our mobile apps, primarily across iOS, Android and the mobile Web,”  he added. This could mean that Facebook which launched its own app centre is likely to see deeper integration with iOS and Android. iOS6 and Macbook’s Mountain Lion OS already come with Facebook integration which allows users to post messages, status messages etc without logging into the site or app. Hopefully Android will see similar integration soon. You can view the full transcript of Zuckerberg’s call here.