BlackBerry may be on its way out of the consumer smartphone market, but there's no shortage of interest from companies looking to acquire all or parts of the company. The latest company is Facebook, whose executives recently met with BlackBerry execs, according to The Wall Street Journal. Facebook has dipped its toe in the smartphone market before, at least through partnerships with HTC, but maybe it has a much deeper interest.
Fairfax Financial has the most public bid for BlackBerry, though Lenovo is also eyeing parts of the company, as is BlackBerry co-founder Mike Lazaridis, Google, and several other big players in the tech industry. Right now several of those interested parties have signed NDA agreements to look over BlackBerry's financials, so it doesn't necessarily mean that a bid has already been placed.
If Facebook does indeed move forward with a BlackBerry purchase, it's possible the company will consider developing its own smartphone. Judging by the success of the HTC First, or lack thereof we should say, the social network certainly has its work cut out for it. That's not even considering that Amazon is reportedly working with HTC on three new devices, all of which will likely provide direct access to the online retailer's huge ecosystem of media and applications. Facebook will really need to show consumers how its products can differentiate, especially with its Facebook Home service already active and available as a free download for Android devices.
We won't get too far ahead of ourselves, though. These are just preliminary meetings, so we'll need to sit back and see what the future holds for BlackBerry.
