#GimmeThatHTC Phone Contest!
UPDATE: THE CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED! TABULATING THE RESULTS. THE WINNER WILL BE ANNOUNCED SHORTLY!
Want a new phone? Listen up!
HTC hooked me up with a phone to give away to YOU! No catch, no gimmicks, no bullshit.
The winner can choose one of HTC’s most sought after phones (full list of choices below) including the HTC One X+ the phone that beat out my iPhone 5… no, really!
OK, enough talk. There are two ways to enter:
Option 1 (Twitter):
- Tweet using the has htag #GimmeThatHTC and tell us why you want a new phone. (Each tweet earns you an entry. Limited to 10 daily.) *Bonus points for following @HTC and @TEKSTartist!
Option 2 (Tumblr):
- Simply like or reblog this post (likes count as 1 entry, reblogs earn you 5 entries.)
The contest closes and all entries will be compiled Tuesday, April 2nd at 2 PM PST. Winner will be selected at random.
If you win, you can choose 1 of the following devices (carrier specific):
AT&T: HTC One X+
Sprint: EVO 4G LTE
T-Mobile: HTC One S
Verizon: DROID DNA
Outside the US: One X+
Good Luck!
The "Facebook Phone" Lives
techcrunch.comNice scoop by Josh Constine of TechCrunch:
Facebook just invited press to an event at its headquarters on April 4th to “Come See Our New Home On Android”. Sources tell us it will be a modified version of the Android operating system with deep native Facebook functionality on the homescreen that may live on an HTC handset. The evidence aligns to say this is the Facebook Phone announcement people have been speculating about for years.
Others have since backed this up as well.
I was a few months off, but this is basically what I had heard back in January as well.
There seems to be some disagreement over whether or not this would constitute a “fork” of Android. It would seem there is a way for Facebook to do this with Google’s blessing (just as they bless TouchWiz and other “skins”). But make no mistake, this is not stock Android. Facebook will deeply inject their own apps into the core of the OS. As long as they don’t replace Search, Maps, and a few others, Google should be okay with it — for now.
One wildcard is the Play Store. Facebook has their own App Center (which right now links to Play Store and the App Store), which they presumably could make work as a stand-alone Android app store as well. But it’s hard to see how that wouldn’t piss off Google. See: Amazon.
Another question: what will the carriers think of this? Presumably, they’ll have at least one on board with the HTC phone. Facebook has been making a lot of noise about “free calls” within their Messenger apps — this could all but destroy the notion of cellular “minutes”.
Of course, that writing has been on the wall for some time. Data phones are the way going forward. Still, the carriers must be a little scared of the post-minutes, post-SMS world that this Facebook Phone highlights. It’s a huge change. The carriers are finally becoming the dumb pipes they were meant to be.
