Facebook may be well positioned in certain ways to enter the smartphone market. It already has an entire operating system complete with messaging, calendar, contacts and video, and an immense app store is on its way with thousands of highly popular apps. There’s also that billion-dollar camera app, in the form of Instagram.
If Facebook fails with its own team of engineers, it could buy a smartphone maker. The company took in $16 billion from its bumpy I.P.O. It could easily scoop up an infirm company like Research in Motion, which is valued at less than $6 billion, and drop a beautifully designed Facebook operating system on top of RIM’s phones. HTC, which is upset with Google for buying Motorola, is worth about $11.8 billion and becoming cheaper by the day.
Facebook would not necessarily challenge Apple if it entered the smartphone marketplace. Instead, it could be Facebook vs. Google, which makes the Android operating system, with both companies going after a huge number of buyers of lower-priced smartphones.
“When you offer an advertising-based phone, you’re targeting all the users on prepay that are budget-conscious of their communications costs,” said Carolina Milanesi, a vice president and analyst for the Gartner Group.
Facebook plans to release its own smartphone by next year, says the NY Times.
The company has already hired more than half a dozen former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone, and one who worked on the iPad, according to at least one source.
In another rumor, the social networking giant is eyeing a purchase of face recognition technology company Face.com. Newsgeek reports that the deal size could be between $80 million and $100 million. Founded in 2007, Face.com offers accurate facial recognition software that could help Facebook users identify people in photos faster, both on desktop and mobile.
Meanwhile, Amazon will sell prepaid wireless service in Japan, reports The Verge. Amazon will enter the Japanese MVNO market, selling prepaid 500MB SIM cards for a flat rate about $25; about one third the rate of other cellular operators, reports Nikkei. The cards will be usable on NTT Docomo’s LTE network — the nation’s largest with over 60 million subscribers.
NTT uses separate frequencies for both downlink and uplink transmissions in the 2 GHz band. By March 2013, DOCOMO plans to have some 15,000 base stations serving 40 percent of the population. It is expected that a quarter of the company’s subscribers, or 15 million people, will have migrated to LTE by March 2015.
DoCoMo currently dominates LTE service, while the country’s two other major carriers are KDDI and Softbank.
KDDI expects to launch LTE services by the end of 2012. KDDI made a big committment to WiMax though their UQ WiMax network. The UQ WiMAX network now covers over 100 million with two million subscribers.
Softbank uses a “pseudo-TD-LTE” system on its 2.5-GHz spectrum. It lauched in major cities this February, and is aiming for 99 percent coverage by the end of this year. Their Advanced eXtended Global Platform (AXGP) has its roots in Willcom’s PHS micro-cell network, and is cross-compatible with the TD-LTE system that’s planned for China, India and Clearwire.
A smaller provider, eMobile, rolled out its own service last month. According to eMobile, by end-June 2012 its LTE service area will cover 99 percent of the population in Japan’s major cities, including Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka, but only 40 percent of the nation’s overall POPs.
Unlike DoCoMo, both KDDI and Softbank currently offer Apple’s iPhone, which many expect will be equipped to work on LTE networks in future versions.
