Is Facebook working on building its own mobile operating system?
According to LinkedIn, it's certainly hiring the kinds of people who could help it do that.
Some of them are:
- Kean Wong, a former Palm engineer with specialties in system architectural design. He holds 30 or so Palm patents.
- Georges Berenger, who worked at Palm for two years "Building the best virtual keyboards possible for webOS."
- Christopher Tremblay worked at Apple during its iPhone development years, before spending four years at Palm. He got his start at Motorola. His top specialty is graphics systems and frameworks.
- Robert Boyce was an intern at Palm, working on "assorted system applications and services" – the apps that come with a phone.
- Zachary Landau, who spent a year at Palm sounds like the exact kind of person you want on a team building a mobile OS. "My expertise is in OS-less and Linux kernel development, but I enjoy many different kinds of low level work. I have a solid understanding of computer architecture and enjoy working closely with hardware."
- Li Fang joined from RIMM, where his specialty was '"BlackBerry OS."
Does this mean we can expect a Facebook phone soon?
The latest we heard from a plugged in mobile industry source was that Facebook would like to build its own phone operating system, but that it is not much of a priority.
"There is a sense that it is a cool, interesting project, but there are 101 things in front of it on the queue, most notably the IPO."
If there is going to be a phone, says this source, the first manufacture to carry it will probably be HTC.
This source, who talks to a lot of phone makers, says it his understanding that Facebook has not reached a point where it has decided on a target release date.
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