14 DAY TRIAL // More details about the Facebook Phone are leaking and, more importantly, more details about Facebook Home, the Android launcher said to be released in a couple of days. This is the big news coming from Facebook at the event it's got scheduled for April 4.
Android Police has managed to get a hold of the operating system, the customized Android, running on the HTC-built Facebook Phone.
In it, there's a custom Facebook app, the Facebook Home app most likely. This only works when logged in and only for authorized users, mostly Facebook employees who have been testing it until now.
It's unclear whether Facebook will add Home to the Play store, but there shouldn't be any reason not to, there are plenty of other launchers in there.
The Facebook launcher would function like the regular Android launcher, i.e. provide home screens, widgets, app launchers and so on, but also come with some custom features.
Apparently, some of the home screens will function as feeds, for news, updates from friends, photos and so on.
Another custom feature is always-available built-in chat. This could be available in any app, popping up on top of it, making it possible to talk to friends without switching apps.
All in all, the idea seems to be to build Facebook into every aspect of the phone and make it always available.
It's an extension of Facebook's strategy on the site and elsewhere, it wants people to always be connected.
Whether most people will want to be connected to Facebook is another story. Probably not, but this app is not intended for most users, it's for the power users who don't look anything like what you'd call a power user of anything else, including Android itself.
The type of people who would replace the default launcher in Android are not the same that would always want to be connected to Facebook. But Facebook still has at least a few tens of millions of core users who may find the new features interesting.