Finishing the $12.5 billion Motorola Mobility acquisition last week, Google is on the road to release its own smartphone. Surprisingly, talks of another Internet tech giant making a similar move are also surfacing online.

Citing unnamed sources, including Facebook employees and Apple engineers, The New York Times reports that the newly public company is hoping to release its own smartphone by next year. To make the dream come true, the social networking giant has hired more than six former Apple hardware and software engineers who are said to have worked on the iPhone, along with ones who worked on the iPad.

A recent report by Business Insider indicates that Facebook might be on the road to build its own mobile operating system, which has been part of its plans since 2010. Facebook has rolled out its own camera app dubbed Facebook Camera. It already has Facebook messages app, which looks like Facebook's answer to RIM's BBM and Apple's iMessages. And like Apple (iOS App Store) and Google (the Play Store), the newly public company has its own app store too.

"Other core apps like contacts and a calendar are already baked into Facebook. The only biggie that's missing is Maps. Facebook is close with Microsoft, so it could probably get a Bing-based mapping app," the Business Insider report affirms.

The rumors about Facebook Phone are, however, not new. We first heard about Facebook phone from TechCrunch in 2010. Last November, All Things Digital reported that Facebook is partnering up with the Taiwanese mobile major HTC to develop Facebook-branded smartphone. It is to be noted that at Mobile World Congress in February 2011, HTC announced two android smartphones - HTC Salsa and HTC ChaCha - with physical Facebook button.

According to the Times report, the first two attempts to build its own smartphone were real. However, the social networking giant underestimated the process and as a result the phone never arrived. But, this attempt is different because Facebook has half a dozen former Apple engineers at its disposal.

Facebook is also rumored to be interested in buying Opera. So the company has pretty much everything needed to build its own mobile operating system and eventually a smartphone too.