Rumors of Facebook creating their own phone has been rekindled. According to the New York Times, the leading social network in the world is supposedly having another go at building their own smartphone, but this time they’re pulling out all the stops. The report details that the social media company is grabbing smartphone talent by the bucketful, specifically former Apple engineers that worked on the iPhone and the iPad.
According to the report from the New York Times, Facebook’s chief executive peppered a former Apple engineer about the inner workings of smartphones, which included questions about chips used in them. The motivation behind the push is clear to the people involved an unnamed Facebook employee said that “Mark is worried that if he doesn’t create a mobile phone in the near future that Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms.”
There have been attempts to closely integrate Facebook into smartphones, like the HTC ChaCha (pictured above) – in fact, HTC still has an ongoing collaboration with Facebook to create a smartphone, codenamed “Buffy”. Whether people would buy a smartphone made by the social networking leader is still up for debate.
Source: New York Times