Facebook is not yet ready for the mobile hardware game but it needs to come up with a reference implementation to show its hardware partners how the next-generation mobile Facebook (which will be equipped with Graph Search Engine capabilities) should be deeply integrated with mobile hardware.
The risks are high for Facebook if it was to launch its own smartphone - and the risks could outweigh any benefits that it would gain. So I doubt very much that Facebook is interested in having its own phone or co-branding a third-party phone. It has tried to do this with couple of manufacturers and has failed miserably. Facebook has no experience in mobile and hardware reference design, so any involvement in mobile hardware would be suicide for the company.
So the announcement this week could potentially be about many things, including a mobile platform (not a hardware platform). It could be about a new mobile ecosystem (Amazon style) and give some details about the partners that are likely to support it.
This is not the first time that the industry has been speculating about a Facebook phone. Similar speculations flooded the Internet last January but it turned out that the company was preparing to announce its Graph Search Engine, a powerful tool that could enable consumers to search and build diagnostics based on this tool.
Ironically, although the power of the Graph Search Engine will only be demonstrated over mobile phones, Facebook decided to launch it for desktop PCs first. I believe this was not a strategic choice by Facebook but rather because the implementation is a lot easier over a PC platform than over a mobile phone.
For mobile phones, the Graph Search Engine needs to be deeply integrated into the hardware and, given the fragmented mobile-phone landscape, this will not be easy without creating a reference design showing how the whole Facebook platform, including the Graph Search Engine, should be implemented in the hardware and be able to use all the phone APIs efficiently. Once done, Facebook then needs to find a hardware partner.
So the announcement could well be to do with the first mobile implementation of the Graph Search Engine and a new mobile Facebook platform/ecosystem. HTC could well be the first partner and Android could well be the first OS to benefit from this implementation.
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