Soon We'll Tell You If Facebook Is Making An Android Phone
Or at least, we'll tell you whatever they're about to tell us, and it appears more than likely that it'll have something to do with phones, contact lists, and a mysterious connection to Firefox, iPhone, Google Chrome OS, and two of the most rock and roll developers in the world: Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos. We'll be at a special Mobile Event at Facebook HQ on November 3rd and we'll be able to tell you all about it. Until then, speculation below!
Informed speculation time! That's almost the best kind, right? Let's take a quick walk back to mid September, where our pals at TechCrunch were tipped by an anonymous source that Facebook was building a phone. This was the same sort of situation that went down less than a year ago when the world received secret news that Google was building a phone. I think you know how that turned out.
It is sais that Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos, both of them high level employees at Facebook, are said to be secretly working on this project, and that because of their fabulous super powers in mobile OS, they're going to rock it really hard. Both of them have a whoa-is-who list of accomplishments that'd make them powerhouse additions to any developer team for a phone.
Papakipos was leading the Google Chrome OS project for a while until he quit that project in June 2010. He quit and joined the Facebook team instead. Hewitt, on the other hand, helped create the Firefox browser and worked on "web-based operating system" Parakey before it was acquired by Facebook in 2007. Hewitt is also responsible for designing all of Facebook's iPhone web apps and native apps, but quit that particular job late 2009.
So boom, baby. How realistic is this? Very. The other thing is that this doesn't necessarily have to be a phone. It could be a giant addition to Facebook in the form of an app that works everywhere, including your desktop, working as a big fat list of your friends with whom you can now not only message and post on walls for free, you can now call. Face to face, Facebook. That's my informed guess for the day.
One more addition from the streets is that there's a man named Li Ka-Shing possibly in on this equation. This man is a very big investor who very recently was said to be putting money in a pot with some other folks going toward a phone project with INQ and Spotify. Li Ka-Shing is also a bigtime investor in Facebook. Is a phone developed between INQ and Facebook in the works? Spot gets the square.
Again let me remind you to be around here on SlashGear all day November 3rd. We'll be at the Facebook Mobile meeting at Facebook headquarters, and you can bet we'll be relaying the info they give to us quick as a bunny!
[Via TechCrunch]