It has long been rumoured that Facebook is working on a project to build its own smartphone. Codenamed ‘Buffy’, the phone would bring Facebook into direct competition with Apple, Microsoft/Nokia, Samsung, Sony, HTC and the others in the hardware/software mobile space.

A recent report by the New York Times suggests Facebook has hired “more than half a dozen former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone, and one who worked on the iPad”.

If this is true, then it may bring some comfort to those investors who have lost so much on Facebook’s IPO.

HTC was once the rumoured hardware partner with Facebook and the platform for the phone project was said to be Android.

However, if Facebook’s newly-hired engineers can develop and build a new smartphone, one that would run on its own operating system, then things become interesting.

Mark Zuckerberg, it seems, believes that if Facebook doesn’t have its own piece of mobile hardware and its own operating system, it could just become an app on other mobile platforms. He is right to think this.

Facebook is also close to buying its own operating system, Opera, which would suggest the ‘Buffy’ project is well underway and a Facebook phone is fast becoming a must have for the social network, rather than a rumour.