There have been plenty of rumors suggesting that Facebook could be interested in making another mobile phone despite the less than stellar reception they had with the HTC ChaCha. Whether those rumors pan out remain to be seen, but in the meantime it certainly looks like the social networking giant has a lot of interest as far as the mobile scene is concerned. French carrier Orange has recently announced that they would be offering a “social calling” service via Facebook. Basically what this does is that it enables users to call each other or even create group calls without needing to know the other person’s number. Orange, of course, will be one powering this new “social calling” service and it will be running in conjunction with the carrier’s new IP-based calling/messaging app, Libon.
According to Orange, the Facebook social calling service will be going live in France first come summer of 2013, although we expect that if the social calling service is well received, it will soon start rolling out to other parts of Europe and possibly the rest of the world. If a new Facebook phone were ever to materialize, we’d expect that this social calling service might play a big part in it.