TechCrunch broke the news and Business Insider is also reporting that Facebook is working on their own mobile handset. The first report claimed that Facebook’s Joe Hewitt and Eric Tseng (previous Facebook iPhone app developer and previous Senior Product Manager for Android at Google) are heading up the project. When Business Insider chimed in, however, the scope of the project seemed to make more sense than Facebook creating a mobile OS from scratch — they’re rumored to be using Android as the base layer and heavily customizing the UI, applications, and experience. Before you get too excited, it’s being reported the project won’t be ready until late 2011, and even better, Facebook PR has chimed in saying that they are “not building a phone.” If this does pan out to be true, is a Facebook-heavy Android-based handset something that would interest you?
Facebook working on their own phone?
Published Sep 19th, 2010 4:01PM EDT
If you buy through a BGR link, we may earn an affiliate commission, helping support our expert product labs.
Jonathan S. Geller founded Boy Genius Report, now known as BGR, in 2006. It became the biggest mobile news destination in the world by the end of 2009, and BGR was acquired by leading digital media company PMC in April 2010.
Jonathan is President of BGR Media, LLC., and Editor-in-chief of the BGR website.
What started as a side project at the age of 16, quickly transpired into 24-hour days and nights of sharing exclusive and breaking news about the mobile communications industry. BGR now reaches up to 100 million readers a month through the website, syndication partners, and additional channels.
