According to a latest report of The New York Times, Facebook is planning to make an entry into the mobile market with its own smartphone. It can be a new source of revenue for Facebook but according to analysts, it won't be a smart move as the competition in this area is quite tough.
The folks of Facebook have recently hired a bunch of iPhone and iPad hardware and software engineers. Some unnamed sources inside Facebook also said that Facebook is planning to make its own smartphone. The growing area of mobile development has caught Mark Zuckerberg's attention and he is all set to step in this area, but analysts are not sure about this step of Facebook as it does not make much sense.
Facebook already owns a large number of mobile users and recently the number of Facebook users on mobile surpassed 500 million. But that doesn't really make the idea of Facebook phone profit-worthy. "I question whether Facebook needs to make its own hardware" said Geoff Blaber, the leading mobile device software researcher of CCS Insight. He also said "Google needed to extend search across mobile devices with Android, whereas Facebook already has a huge amount of engagement on mobile." Blaber is not the only person to feel that a Facebook phone may not be a good idea. Some other analysts also feel the same.
There is also a rumor roaming online about Facebook that it's planning to buy Nokia and build 'FacePhone.' A Paris-based marketing expert has predicted that people can expect to see FacePhone in the market in 18 months and it will run on the Windows Phone operating system. "Facebook appears to be trying to emulate Google, much like Google tried to emulate Apple," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group.
Most of the analysts believe that the smartphone market is already crowded and making a place in this market can be really tough. "We're working across the entire mobile industry; with operators, hardware manufacturers, OS providers, and application developers" is what Facebook had to say in response to the report and rumors. It is also a fact that the last effort made by Facebook in making social network-integrated smartphone - HTC ChaCha and Salsa - wasn't very successful.
