Ina Fried

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Facebook’s Phone Also Coming to France Telecom-Orange, but First to AT&T

AT&T will be first with the HTC Facebook phone, but plenty of other carriers are lining up to be second.

Among those also carrying the HTC First will be France Telecom-Orange, which plans to sell it in France and in the United Kingdom, through its EE joint venture.

The HTC device is the first in a series of phones that will come preloaded with the Facebook Home software introduced by the social network on Thursday.

“We have been working for months and months with Facebook,” France Telecom-Orange’s Yves Maitre said in an interview. AT&T will start selling the HTC First for $99.99 on April 12; Orange said that its launch will come this summer, with pricing and an exact date to be announced later.

Orange and AT&T are among the carriers and hardware makers that are part of a program Facebook has to get the software onto new device.

Other partners listed on Thursday include Chinese phone makers Alcatel One Touch, Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo, as well as giants Sony and Samsung.

And whereas Orange executives are known for talking about how challenging some of their other hardware partners can be, Maitre said Facebook has been very open to input from carriers.

“It has been a great collaboration,” he said. “It has been a lot of fun to work with them and that is not always the case.”

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik