Facebook wants to turn your Android handset into a “Facebook phone" - by Alexandra Chang

Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn your Android phone into a simple sharing device. And by that, he means he wants to turn it into a Facebook phone.

Facebook just announced Facebook Home, which all but turns any Android handset into a “Facebook phone” by putting the social giant right there on the home screen and all of its products at the forefront of the UI. It isn’t a phone made by Facebook. It’s something better than that, and in some ways, more important: a deeply integrated application with its hooks set tightly into the Android platform. Think of it as an apperating system.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hinting at following this path for years, even as he fought back incessant Facebook phone rumors. A phone is “so clearly the wrong strategy for us,” he said last year. And he’s right. Facebook can’t take on Apple and Samsung, or even Microsoft and BlackBerry. Making hardware is a lot of work, and that kind of work doesn’t make sense for Facebook right now. Instead, the social network is ensuring it can be as front-and-center as possible on all the most popular platforms today.

“Today we’re finally going to talk about that Facebook phone. Or more accurately we’re going to talk about how you can turn your Android phone into a great social, simple device,” Zuckerberg said at the launch event in Menlo Park. He went on to describe how people most often use Facebook on their mobile devices and explain why Facebook chose to build an Android experience, rather than a phone. “A great phone might sell 10 or 20 million units at best. Our community as more than 1 billion people in it. Even if we did a good job selling a phone, we would only be serving 1 to 2 percent of our community and we want to do more than that.”

Note EU-Digest: this is all nice and dandy, but like it already is the case with Microsoft, the consumer, unfortunately, is now at a point where he or she is "force-fed" operating systems and apps on computers, tablets and smart-phones they buy . 

As a result the consumer in reality has less and less flexibility today when it comes to their personal choices and preferences in regards to the apps and operating systems which are already a part of the products they buy. 

 Read more: Facebook Home: Zuck’s Android Takeover | Gadget Lab | Wired.com