"Employees of Facebook and several engineers who have been sought out by recruiters there, as well as people briefed on Facebook's plans, say the company hopes to release its own smartphone by next year. These people spoke only on the condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing their employment or relationships with Facebook. The company has already hired more than half a dozen former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone, and one who worked on the iPad, the employees and those briefed on the plans said." Who would risk signing a two-year contract only to end up with next year's MySpace Phone? A bit extreme, perhaps, but history has shown us that social networks do not have particular staying power.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Member since:
2008-04-15
social networking can never achieve ubiquity unless it retains the ability to exclude others. exclusivity satisfies the inner urge humans have to feel like they are better than their peers.
unfortunately becoming a public company, (News Corp buying myspace and now Facebook) pretty much guarantees that profit beats out exclusivity and profit is unpopular.
Member since:
2006-01-10
Let alone trying to steal market share from Android and iOS, how the hell is FB going to release a smart phone considering all the patent and other legal hurdles out there. I guess they'll partner with an OEM.
With all that aside, I could be wrong, but I just don't see people getting rid of their Android/iOS phones for a FB phone.
Edited 2012-05-29 01:33 UTC
Member since:2006-02-01
Since it all speculation and rumors, I guess some journalists are miscalculating the complexity of creating a smartphone from scratch and are assuming it would be easy for Facebook to build its own smartphone. More likely, HTC is working on the hardware, and Facebook is developing a custom version of Android with very deep Facebook integration.
Member since:2005-07-11
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2010-06-08
Member since:2006-04-10