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'Facebook Home' leak suggests company will reveal Android homescreen replacement on Thursday

'Facebook Home' leak suggests company will reveal Android homescreen replacement on Thursday

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Facebook Android login screen (stock)
Facebook Android login screen (stock)

We're just a few days away from the Facebook Home event at which the social media giant is expected to release a true "Facebook Phone" by HTC. However, Android Police have apparently gotten their hands on a system software dump from the rumored device and have released a number of details about what Facebook may be unveiling on Thursday. Essentially, it sounds like Facebook Home will be a launcher replacement that runs on top of HTC's Sense 4.5 skin and Android 4.1.2 — not the recently-introduced Sense 5 that runs on the HTC One.

Is this the 'true' Facebook phone?

Unfortunately, Android Police wasn't able to log into Facebook with the software they received, as it is only currently accepting logins from Facebook employees. This means that most of the details behind the user experience of this new phone are still shrouded in mystery. However, it seems that Facebook Home will just be an extension of the existing Facebook app integrated into an Android launcher — much like other third-party launchers such as Nova, Facebook Home won't change the core OS at all, it'll just provide a new way of interacting with it on the front end. There's also some evidence that Facebook Home will run on phones besides the HTC device it's set to premier on — some permissions within the software will let it run on HTC Sense, stock Android, and TouchWiz, which Android Police believes is a sign the app is destined for Google Play.

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There were also a few hardware details worth noting — the phone itself appears to be a mid-range model codenamed the HTC Myst, which has a 4.3-inch 720p screen, 1GB of RAM, a 5-megapixel camera, and the dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 processor. Of course, this all remains a rumor until Thursday. Without seeing the software running in any significant fashion, it's hard to say that this is exactly what Facebook will be showing off — though it does match up with the rumors thus far.