The Interweb were busy this weekend with rumours that newly public company Facebook is in the process of building a mobile phone. This isn’t the first time that we’ve heard such rumours, and many manufactures have been linked to be the hardware of choice to be working with Facebook.
So what triggered the latest rumour? Nick Bilton over at he New York Times reports, says a number of sources have shared with him their plans to build one for next year. Facebook has already hired about half a dozen former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone, and one who worked on the iPad.
As a newly public company they are now under tremendous pressure to provide value back to shareholders, and mobile is an area that Facebook has admitted it has been lacking in the past, so launching a mobile phone is definitely an option they are looking into, to some degree of seriousness. There has also been a lot of chatter that they might pick up Opera, a browser that competes against Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Internet Explore, Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari.
If they don’t build their own smartphone, I guess they could buy one – RIM maybe?