RUMOR: FACEBOOK PHONE REAL, SORT OF

There have been a lot of rumors about a so-called Facebook Phone in the last year, despite the fact that Facebook themselves firmly deny the rumor. In September, we heard that the Facebook Phone was going to be made by INQ and bundled with Spotify; a couple months later, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said that there would be no one single Facebook phone, but that he wanted every phone to come with Facebook.

So which is it? A recent Bluetooth certification test has revealed that INQ is indeed working on a mobile phone called the Cloud Touch with Facebook pulsating at its core. The phone is described like this in the certification:

An Android smartphone built to make messaging faster and smarter. It’s designed around the way people naturally communicate and has Facebook built into its core. The homescreen features multiple entry points to different Facebook functions, while a dynamic widget displays a feed of status updates, albums, videos and photos.

That sounds like more than a casual integration with Facebook’s services. In fact, going by Zuckerberg’s statements, it sounds like the first handset of many baking Facebook’s core services deep into the OS and UI of a smartphone…. an interpretation given some additional credence by INQ’s quick response to the leak, which was to scrub any mention of Facebook from the Bluetooth certification.

It certainly looks likely that 2011 will see the release of at least one Facebook phone. The question is, are more yet to come, and how involved is Facebook itself in INQ’s handset? Only time and an official announcement will tell.