Facebook hopes to release its own smartphone by next year, as the newly public social networking giant looks to boost its revenue in the mobile Internet market, the New York Times reported Monday.
The company has hired more than half a dozen software and hardware engineers who have worked on Apple's bestselling iPhone and one engineer who has iPad experience, the paper said, citing employees and other unnamed sources.
It has also expanded a group working on a partnership with Taiwan's HTC to create a smartphone codenamed "Buffy" -- a project first revealed last year by technology blog All Things Digital.
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One former Apple engineer who worked on the iPhone and was recruited said he had met with Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg "who then peppered him with questions about the inner workings of smartphones," the report said.
"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," a Facebook employee told the New York Times.
