One More Thing FaceBook Could Be Announcing Tuesday is FaceBook Messenger For iPad

Take a look at that “reach friends wherever they are now” image to the left. What’s missing between the iPhone and the laptop? Ding ding ding! You’re right! A tablet.

Okay, I’m sure it was obvious. In fact, many of you may have already assumed that Facebook has a version of its Messenger for iPad. Well it doesn’t, and seeing as though it took the company quite awhile to launch Facebook for iPad, the lag comes as no surprise.

This graphic might have to change next Tuesday, when Facebook is holding an event for press to “come and see what [they're] building.” While my colleagues are hearing that this “what [they're] building” is a “big deal” as in a “phone” or a slew of ads and other improvements, I’m hearing that one of the products that could be announced is Messenger for iPad.

Specifically I’m hearing that Messenger for iPad, replete with all the Messenger features we’ve come to love like emoticons, photo sharing, read receipts, location tagging, group messaging and the new voice recorded messaging feature, is ready for the public eye. And basically, it’s what exists on the iPhone, but in a bigger format.

According to one source, the app is “totally” ready to launch on Tuesday, and if the event is indeed a series of mobile product announcements, it could “totally” fit in conceptually. Other points that back this up: We’ve head that Messenger head Peter Deng was “cranking” a couple of days ago and Facebook partner Microsoft is killing its Messenger service exactly a month after whatever it is being announced.

A fully fleshed-out Messenger for iPad, eventually including video chat, VoIP and voice messages, could be another Facebook attempt at killing your home phone. The combination of cheap VoIP with Facebook’s social graph and distribution network could be enough to get people to cut back on their home phone plans and save their mobile minutes/data.

And ”reaching friends wherever they are now” includes on the couch, watching HBO’s “Girls” on their iPads. With voice and video, Messenger for iPad could become the way you have Sunday afternoon conversations with family or distant friends.

Other Facebook apps that need to be extended to the iPad include Instagram and Poke. It could be that Facebook is rebuilding its apps in preparation for a revamp of its core product on mobile, and starting with Messenger. In any case, Messenger for iPad is coming soon, so whether it’s Tuesday or not, get ready to be Messaging in a bigger format. Go iPad or go home. [Tech Crunch]

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A Report Says That The FaceBook Phone Could Be Unveiled On January The 15th

Remember that persistent rumor regarding the potential existence of a Facebook phone that just won’t go away but doesn’t actually seem to have any merit? Well it would seem that the speculation has risen once again around a Facebook smart devices of sorts thanks to an event being held by the company and the overheard murmurings of words like "mobile" and "this is going to be a big deal". In the past all we have heard are rumors without much substance behind them, but it seems that a number of different sources are expecting Facebook to show off a mobile device this coming Tuesday, in one form or another.

Camps seem to split when it comes to Facebook. On one hand they have over one billion active global members, a large portion of which include being active on the social network in their day-to-day activities. On other hand, a whole lot of people seem to be growing frustrated with the site and want nothing to do with it. A bespoke Facebook mobile offering of sorts could definitely revamp things, but we still don’t know what we could be getting on Tuesday.

We heard speculation toward the back end of 2012 that suggest Taiwan based HTC were in the process of producing a Facebook branded smartphone that would be dedicated to running the social network. There is still a potential for that to happen but considering the nature of the business and the interest surrounding such a device it seems highly unusual that we have heard nothing since or that we haven’t seen any kind of hardware leak. The alternative is of course that Facebook won’t be announcing any branded hardware on Tuesday and that the event will focus on a Facebook OS of sorts.

If the latter is true then we could see a custom-built mobile operating system that we imagine would be of a similar ilk as Firefox OS. That option would seem to make sense in the immediate future as it would allow Facebook to run their operating system on a number of devices from varying manufacturers rather than place all of their eggs in one basket with their own hardware. The concerning aspect of the whole equation is that Facebook have not only consistently denied rumors of producing their own mobile device but have also stated the same thing directly to their business partners at Apple, Google and others.

With Facebook’s history in experimenting with Android powered devices to see if they can tweak it to their needs and their continued desire to place resources into mobile, it should be an extremely interesting announcement come Tuesday, if it happens at all. [RedmondPie]

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