We all remember the HTC Salsa and the HTC ChaCha, two phones that the Taiwanese manufacturer launched at the 2011 MWC, with a dedicated share to Facebook button — everybody was calling them generically “the Facebook phones”.

According to recent reports, HTC has teamed up with Facebook to deliver “a customized smartphone”, believed to be launched earliest in the third quarter of the year. Of course, the info comes from “industry sources” so you need to treat this with the usual dose of salt.

On a side note, sources believe that Samsung will continue to be the OEM for Nexus devices in the future — which is strange now that Motorola is part of Google. In the light of these reports — and given that the first Nexus was an HTC phone — the Taiwanese phone maker might be tempted to find traction elsewhere (like with Facebook and its insanely large user pool.

The “sources” allegedly mentioned that the upcoming HTC-Facebook phone “will have a platform exclusive to Facebook to enable and integrate all functions available on the social networking site”. Whether it will be an Android-powered smartphone or a feature phone/smart dumbphone/dumb smartphone is yet unknown.

Source: DigiTimes