Zuckerberg’s Facebook Phone is the HTC Opera UL claims insider

The perennial Facebook phone rumor has resurfaced, with chatter that the HTC Opera UL will be the social site’s first “official” smartphone as it attempts to tighten its slack in mobile. The Opera UL, as HTC has internally called it, is an OEM device “made for Facebook” a source tells Pocket-lint, while leaked benchmarks suggest it will have a 1.4GHz processor and run Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean.

The exact identity of that processor is unclear, though since it’s paired with a Qualcomm Adreno 305 that does narrow the field somewhat. So far, we’ve seen that GPU used with various iterations of the Snapdragon S4 Plus (though not the S4 Pro, as in the LG Nexus 4), each with a dualcore CPU.

Other tidbits from the NenaMark2 benchmark leak include a 1280 x 720 display, which is in keeping with other recent high-end devices from HTC. Although HTC has flirted with both full-touch and QWERTY form-factors in its own-brand Facebook handsets before – the Salsa and the ChaCha - with a resolution like that, unless it’s a slider, then our guess would be touchscreen-only.

According to the insider, we shouldn’t necessarily expect to see the Facebook phone any time soon. “Apparently it’s been delayed” the source said; with no public release timescale, mind, the exact impact of that “delay” can’t really be judged.

Although Facebook has long denied that it intends to release an own-brand device, rumors of the work-in-progress have circulated nonetheless. Whispers from inside the company indicate Facebook has been reworking Android for its own web-centric purposes, much as Amazon refettled Google’s OS for the Kindle Fire.

Facebook’s software and hardware efforts at its modified Android approach have been accelerating in recent months, according to other sources, with ex-Apple engineers supposedly poached to work on the project. More than six ex-iPhone engineers and an ex-iPad engineer, with a mixture of hardware and software skills, were tipped to have quietly joined the company midway through this year.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg again dismissed chatter of a dedicated device back in September, but did emphasize that Facebook is focusing on mobile users moving forward, as they increasingly comprise its most active userbase. Back in pre-IPO days, Facebook filings to the SEC publicly voiced the company’s fears that it might see revenues fall should users begin to favor the mobile interface, which has been less monetized than the desktop view.

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Ex-OnLive employee claims half of workforce laid off

Friday was something of a whirlwind day for the employees and executives of OnLive. At the start of the day, we heard that OnLive would be shutting down, with a number of employees saying they had been handed pink slips. Throughout the day, OnLive executives claimed that everything was fine. After the end of business of Friday, OnLive announced that it had been “acquired into a newly-formed company” and with this freshly-found financial backing, would be re-hiring a “large percentage” of its staff as it makes this transition.

Of course, that statement was specifically vague, as OnLive didn’t clarify who its new investors were or just how many employees would get to keep their jobs. One of those fired employees has given a better idea of what’s going on behind the scenes, telling PCMag that “definitely over half” of the company’s employees were let go during a meeting on Friday morning. It appears that the employees who were fired on Friday won’t be getting their jobs back as the company makes this transition, as some employees received job offers on Friday while others received notices of termination.

Not only that, but this ex-employee says that those who were fired weren’t given any kind of severance package, only pay for their last week of work. Things seemed to have changed around the OnLive offices pretty quickly as well, with those given the boot being told to vacate the premises by the end of the day. So, things may not have gone as well as OnLive executives would have us believe, but as with every story, there are two sides to hear.

Indeed, there still is a lot we don’t know about this whole OnLive deal, and we’re hoping that things become at least a little more clear in the coming days and weeks. If what this ex-OnLive employee says is true, then that’s a real shame for those who lost their jobs. We’re hoping that’s not the case, but we won’t know for sure until OnLive gets a bit more specific – if it ever does at all. Stay tuned, because this OnLive story is definitely far from over.

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Samsung Investigates Child Labor Claims at Chinese Factory

Samsung is sending a team to investigate conditions at a supplier’s factory in China, following a report from a labor-rights watchdog that accused the factory of employing underage workers.

Samsung’s inspectors will be dispatched to Huizhou, China on Thursday to address the claims, which were made by China Labor Watch. CLW’s report alleged that HEG Electronics, a Samsung supplier, has been using child labor.

The company has already made two inspections of the facility this year, neither of which revealed any “irregularities,” according to a release.

“Samsung Electronics is a company held to the highest standards of working conditions and we try to maintain that at our facilities and the facilities of partner companies around the world,” reads the company’s statement.

Samsung is the top smartphone manufacturer in China, having sold 22% of smartphones purchased in the country in the first quarter of 2012. Its newest smartphone, the Galaxy Nexus S III, has already broke shipping records worldwide.

Apple, one of Samsung’s major competitors, previously came under fire for allegedly poor working conditions at supplier Foxconn’s factories in Shenzhen, China.

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Foxconn workers get paid $1.78 an hour.

Rent is about $17 a month for a dorm room shared with seven other roommates.

Despite low wages and grueling conditions, 3,000 people lined up at Foxconn for an opportunity to work at the factory. According to Nightline, Foxconn's need for more employees to help meet the demand for Apple products is so high that it planned to hire about 80 percent of those vying for a job.

It takes five days and 375 sets of hands to assemble an iPad, according to Nightline.

In only two shifts, workers can make 300,000 iPad cameras.

Foxconn employees use a raw piece of aluminum to form the iPad's exterior design, along with the Apple logo, at a rate of creating 10,000 each hour.

A worker carves the Apple logo for the iPad from the aluminum case for 3,000 devices every shift.

The worker shifts are 12 hours and include two one-hour long meal breaks. Lunch is $0.70 for meat and rice.

Nightline anchor Bill Weir expected most employees to be as young as 13, but noted most were in their late teens.

Suicide nets were installed in Spring 2010 when nine Foxconn workers killed themselves during a three-month time period.

Although 18 employees took their own lives or tried to in recent years, Nightline said Foxconn's suicide rate is well below China's national average.

All images courtesy of ABC Nightline.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ictor

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Samsung to investigate claims of supplier’s underage employees

Samsung personnel with be heading off to Huizhou, China tomorrow to investigate claims that one of its suppliers is employing underage workers. This investigation comes after the China Labor Watch said it found that seven workers under 16 years of age were working at HEG Electronics. Now Samsung is going to conduct an investigation of its own to make sure nothing shady is going on behind the scenes.

Samsung tells The Verge that it has conducted investigations of HEG on two earlier occasions this year and found nothing alarming while it was there. CLW claims that many more underage workers could be employed by HEG, as it wasn’t allowed to fully investigate all of the company’s departments. Now, Samsung is visiting HEG on August 9 to find out what, exactly, is going on and “take appropriate measures to correct any problems that may surface.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about shady situations with Chinese suppliers. Companies like Apple and Microsoft have come under fire in the past for dealing with suppliers who are lax when it comes to working conditions and child labor. Needless to say, it doesn’t paint a very good public picture when stuff like this gets out, so Samsung obviously wants to address the problems CLW discovered as quickly as possible.

Hopefully Samsung doesn’t find anything bad while there, but it’s very possible that HEG covered up any wrongdoing as best it could when Samsung visited earlier in the year. This time around, you can bet that Samsung will do its best to prevent anything from slipping by it, because reacting quickly is the best thing the company can do with CLW’s report out in the open. Stay tuned, as we’ll have more details about this investigation once they become available.

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Chip maker Rockchip claims worlds first Android 4.0 ICS Tablet

We’ve already seen tons of ROM’s and ports slowly making their way to Android phones and tablets running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich now that the source code is available. Today Chinese processor and tablet maker Rockchip claim to have the worlds first Android 4.0 ICS tablet and it will be ready to ship in the first weeks of December.

Rockchip may or may not sound familiar. They are in-part to blame for the masses of cheap Android tablets that hit Ebay with Android 2.2 and 2.3 back when Android tablets were just starting to hit the market, and many were branded as Rockchip tablets themselves or with 3rd party names. However, none of them had that great of performance sadly. The new RK2918 is a dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex chip that should play a bit nicer and improve performance, not to mention we’ll have the butter smooth Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich for our OS. Here is a video demonstration with the new Rockchip tablet below:

Chinese-made tablets powered by the Rockchip processor will most likely be among the cheapest tablets available. And if they do start shipping in December I’ll bet you money Ebay will be flooded with cheaply made and chunky clunky tablets with lucrative pricing very soon. Don’t get me wrong though, we could see a few nicely designed, sized, and priced tablets from these same chips that would make excellent presents or stocking stuffers. I’ll be letting the first few waves pass and most likely just snag the ASUS Transformer Prime instead.

[via PR Newswire]

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