Following the acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Google for $12.5 billion just last week, we might soon see another major software firm enter the hardware market: Facebook.
Many sources close to the company, including people briefed about Facebook’s future plans, engineers and employees of Facebook claim that the company is looking launch a smartphone as early as next year. However none of the people who commented on this matter revealed their names for fear of reprisal from the company. Those briefed on the plans further added that the company has already recruited one member of the team that was responsible for the development of the iPad as well as six to eight hardware and software engineers who were formerly employed by Apple.
One of the members who were briefed about the plans said that this would be the third time that Facebook is attempting to build a smartphone. The first attempt was back in 2010 when Facebook was first reported to have started working on a smartphone, as revealed by TechCrunch. According to people involved with the project, the company abandoned the plans soon following the difficulties involved.
Last year, the website AllThingsD reported that HTC and Facebook were collaborating to create a smartphone which was codenamed “Buffy”. Though the project is still underway, the company seems to have decided to increase the number of people working on the project while considering other smartphone projects too by recruiting and creating a team of trained hardware engineers who have experience in building a smartphone.
The company did not confirm or deny about these reports on the project when asked on Friday but instead referred to a statement previously issued last year by the company to AllThingsD where they said that the company was working with the entire mobile industry, application developers, OS providers, hardware manufacturers and operators.
An employee at Facebook said that Mark Zukerberg, the CEO of Facebook believes that if the company does not manage to come up with its own smartphone soon, Facebook would remain an app on other mobile operating systems like iOS and Android. Therefore, the thrust for the project seems clear as the company, which has recently gone public, seeks new income sources following fears of falling behind in one of the most promising areas for growth, the mobile industry.
