Facebook smartphone could come by next year

The company has hired more than half a dozen software and hardware engineers who have worked on Apple’s bestselling iPhone and one engineer who has iPad experience, the paper said, citing employees and other unnamed sources.

Another iPhone clone to hit the market. I guess the fools who bought Facebood IPO papers are the only ones who will buy a FB phone.

Message to Zuckerberg: RIM may be in the market shortly.

BTW, Facebook IS an app(which I have deleted as bloatware).

people are getting tired of replacing their own mobile phones and coming to realize only stable emailing and browsing are necessary. who needs new platform? its only facebook to gather much more personal info. as for me no thanks.

In Facebook, maybe we're just seeing another tech bubble go pop. The original dot com bust should have taught us that investing in hype and revenue growth that’s not paired with a steadily improving earnings stream is quite risky, especially when there are outsized valuations on the shares.

This kind of thing never works out. Any company that strays from it's expertise (especially one that was created by accident, and not by design), in a quest for more market share, generally doesn't pan out. It's much better to simply buy a company already producing what you want, rather than create it yourself.

exactly oberst! why dont they use some of that 16 billion they got buy out a small cell comapny and make it better! instead of trying to be innovative with their own phone and wasting more than they are investing =/

easier to take over Nokia.................

Waste of money and time on development....

Knowing their poor track record for changing privacy settings and interfaces on a nearly weekly basis I have no idea why anybody would want to take a chance with a smart phone from them. They are worrying that they are going to become only an application on smart phones? Isn't that obvious already? What could they possibly bring to the market that Apple and Android don't already have? Let alone making yet another OS for app programmers to port to never makes anyone happy. Sounds like they are biting off more than they will be able to chew with this.

It would be like buying a TV made by a network (BBC, NHK, CBS, etc)...unless they buy HTC or something. Considering that Microsoft has not done well in the mobile arena, safe to have low expectations for Farcebook in the mobile telecom hardware space.

Really, do we really need more phones?

I am wondering: Apple engineers do have to sign NDA (non-disclosure agreements). How did they get around?

kind of late! wont work