Facebook has been quiet for the past six months, but only because it’s been working on new products. No, one of them is not a Facebook Phone.
“The phone just doesn’t make any sense,” said a smiling but adamant Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg when asked whether he was working on the mythical Facebook smartphone. The rumor that the social network is working on a physical phone has been bouncing around for years. As recently as July, Bloomberg reported Facebook was working with HTC on a smartphone for 2013, citing sources with knowledge of the matter. Zuckerberg insisted that the number of users the company could reach with a hardware offering “doesn’t move the needle for us.”
Zuckerberg made the comments during a rare press appearance on Tuesday at the TechCruch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. He was interviewed on stage by Silicon Valley blogger and investor Michael Arrington in front of a fully packed auditorium. The Facebook founder and chief executive has stayed out of the spotlight for the past four months since his company went public. In that time, Facebook’s stock has plummeted from its opening day price of $38 a share to around half that. It closed at $19.43 on Tuesday.
