TechCrunch hits out at Facebook for phone hardware story

Tech news website TechCrunch has become embroiled in a war of words against Facebook for reporting the social networking giant is working on a mobile handset.

Facebook issued a statement to several news websites denying the story, but that didn’t stop TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington from issuing a response.

“We’ve been taking a beating today,” he said. Facebook issued a statement saying, “the story is not accurate”. But Arrington hit back, saying,” except the story is accurate”.

“Facebook has been working with hardware manufacturers to explore building their own phone. We don’t know the timing, and we don’t know how deep the software stack is that Facebook is contemplating building, but we know that as of very recently the project was alive and well.”

“So why did Facebook do this? Normally they would just say “we don’t respond to rumours and speculation” when anyone talks about leaks around future products. But this was different. Here’s the reason – they don’t want to freak out Google and Apple and everyone else.”

Arrington puts forward that Facebook already works with Google and Apple very closely, and wouldn’t want to disrupt any current negotiations.