In 2013, the current CEO of Facebook “Mark Zuckerberg” revealed, “HTC First smartphone” which came with the support of the Facebook Home app and was supposed to be the “Facebook phone”.
Although the smartphone was a major failure for both HTC and Facebook, even then they still wanted to go ahead to make a whole smartphone on their own.
In a recent interview with Steven Levy who is the author of the book “Facebook: The Inside Story”, shared some interesting facts about the social media giant.
He said that earlier; Facebook made a prototype smartphone developed only for right-handed users.
The code-name for the prototype phone was given as “GFK”
The Phone was designed by the famous Swiss designer namely Yves Behar. “The author said that the phone comes with an unusual groove in the curved surface, where one could scroll using its right thumb”
Now this unusual groove given to the phone was used to scroll and unlock the phone.
The placement given to the groove made the phone to be extremely difficult for left-handed people to use. However, Facebook went ahead with the design anyway.
The author said that an anonymous employee of the company told him that, “We decided we didn’t care about left-handed people”
Facebook has worked with Intel for developing the processor of the GFK. Intel also developed a technology that would specifically work with the “unusual groove” of the smartphone.
Eventually; Facebook GFK did not make its way to the consumer market. Facebook kept the phone as a secret even from their own employees working on Facebook.
When employees questioned Facebook about the phone; Facebook denied its existence. Ezra Callahan, one of the early 20 employees of the company said, “It was the first time I recall Facebook lying internally”.
