The rumors that Facebook is working on its own phone are going around for a couple of years now and Mark Zuckerberg himself has denied its existence. But now a new report from TechCrunch claims that the social network Facebook indeed has a handset in the works and will be announced next week.

In The Lord of the Rings, when Sauron’s forces capture Gollum, they torture him in Mordor but are only able to get two things out of him: “Shire” and “Baggins”. Over the past few days, we’ve had similar frustrations in trying to track down the content of the Facebook event taking place this coming Tuesday. Despite hounding a number of people who might be in the know, the only discernible things we were able to come up with was: “big deal” and “mobile”.

Interesting, but way too vague. But we endured. And now we have a bit more information. And that information points to a Facebook Phone …of some sort.

Siegler notes that there have been multiple reports about the “Facebook Phone” in the last couple of year and none of them have come to pass, but also says that he has been told, by multiple sources, that Facebook is going to announce a phone of some sort next week.

iDB notes:

Underline “of some sort,” because it doesn’t seem like much is known about the project. It could be new hardware and software — remember, HTC was rumored to be working on a Facebook handset at one point. Or it could be just the software, more specifically a Facebook operating system.

We will keep you updated.

Source [TechCrunch via iDB]