Smart Phone by Facebook

After the recent Facebook IPO at Nasdaq, so many news are coming up from Facebook. Lately we heard about the Facebook browser, that Facebook is going to buy Opera! & now yesterday, BITS reported that Facebook is going to launch a smart phone by the next year.

In 2010, Facebook had already given a try to build a smart phone but due to several complexities, it then gave up the plan. Hugo Fiennes, a hardware manager from Apple who has started his own company said that, “Building isn’t something you can just jump into, you change the smallest thing on a smart phone and you can completely change how all the antennas work. You don’t learn this unless you’ve been doing it for a while.” Fiennes who was with Apple till the launch of 1st 4 iPhones further said that, “Going into the phone business is incredibly complex.”

Zuckerberg has already hired several software and hardware engineers of Apple who have worked on iPhone & iPad. But building a smart phone is indeed a work of complexity. The giants like Hewlett Packard & Dell have also struggled a lot in building smart phone but they dint succeed.

BIT has added in its report that “One engineer who formerly worked at Apple and worked on the iPhone said he had met with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, who then peppered him with questions about the inner workings of smart phones. It did not sound like idle intellectual curiosity, the engineer said; Mr. Zuckerberg asked about intricate details, including the types of chips used, he said. Another former Apple hardware engineer was recruited by a Facebook executive and was told about the company’s hardware explorations.” Asking such questions doesn’t seem to be the qualities of a market leader!

Facebook hasn’t confirmed or denied about its project to build a smart phone but a statement was been pointed which said that, “We’re working across the entire mobile industry; with operators, hardware manufacturers, OS providers, and application developers.”

One of the Facebook employees stated 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.”

For all the above points, I feel that Facebook is currently having billions of dollars with itself, which it can invest in any revenue generating project. But Facebook should consider that its earnings per share don’t fall down. The share price of Facebook has already fallen down at Nasdaq. On Friday, the share was closed at $31.91 (the IPO price being $38).

I just hope that Facebook is not just blindly trying to capture Google’s market. Yesterday we heard that Facebook is going to buy Opera which would lead to fall in market share of Google Chrome. Now that Google has acquired Motorola ($12.5 billion), we are hearing the news that Facebook is going to build a smart phone! Zuckerberg shouldn’t make plans just to gain more leverage from its competitors.