Zeebiz Bureau

New Delhi: Facebook seems to be in full mood to join the band wagon of smartphone makers. According to a report in the New York Times (NYT), Facebook is planning to come up with its own smartphone, for which the company has hired many ex-Apple employees.

The report said Facebook has hired more than half a dozen former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone to build a smartphone as part of their 2013 project, codenamed ‘Buffy’.

This is not the first time that we are hearing such rumours. Major tech magazines too had reported earlier about Facebook working on its own smartphone.

The newspaper quoted a Facebook employee as saying, “Mark (Zuckerberg) is worried that if he doesn’t create a mobile phone in the near future then Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms.”

Facebook had earlier collaborated with HTC and Vodafone to make Facebook friendly mobile phones. The collaboration had produced phones like HTC Salsa, HTC ChaCha and Vodafone Blue 555.

The report also states that Facebook is not publicizing this project and everything is being kept under the wraps.

The looks of the phone, the operating system on which it will work and the pricing is still not clear. However, speculations are pinning down on Android to be the most obvious choice.