Will there be a Walmart phone?

Last week, the long-rumored Facebook phone came to life as Facebook Home. It’s not an actual phone, but a replacement home screen and app launcher for Android. (The HTC First, announced at the Facebook Home event, does offer tighter integration with Facebook Home.)

That got me thinking: are we going to see other companies (not just social networks) following in Facebook’s footsteps to launch their own “phones”? Would that work? If, so how?

I think the best first candidates for a customized Android “experience” are brands that people already interact with on a regular basis already: retailers, entertainment companies or even news outlets.

Amazon is part of the way there already with their Kindle Fire tablets, and they’ve long been rumored to have a phone in development, but their approach so far has been to fully customize the operating system to their devices and not make those changes available to the larger Android community.

I probably wouldn’t want or use a phone customized for Walmart shoppers (or, really, any retail store), but what about an NFL phone? Or, maybe the defunct ESPN MVNO can be resurrected as an Android launcher. In fact, ESPN’s parent company Disney could get in on the game as well with a tween-safe Disney phone, complete with tight integration into their kid-focused social networks.

What brand-powered phone would you be most interested in seeing?