Facebook & Snaptu Bring Apps To Mobile Phones

It's been an exciting week for people that don't own a smartphone, as Facebook announced its latest acquisition, Snaptu, a start-up company that designed a technology to bring mobile apps on simpler "feature" phones. The company was founded in 2007 in Israel, is estimated to have been acquired by the giant social network for £43 million ($70 million).

Snaptu's technology will enable users to use web services such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Facebook on almost any phone. This will be available through a number of applications designed by the company, which are Java-based apps holding similar features to smartphone apps.

Facebook looked into similar companies to acquire and chose Snaptu because it's technology worked on over 2500 different mobile devices. The social network company with over 500 million users, approached Snaptu earlier this year to create a Facebook application, which the start-up company achieved by designing an app resembling the one on smartphones.

Snaptu explained their choice to be part of Facebook on their blog in stating: “We soon decided that working as part of the Facebook team offered the best opportunity to keep accelerating the pace of our product development...And joining Facebook means we can make an even bigger impact on the world.”

Pipon thinks that this is a very smart and soon to be lucrative move by Facebook. Although the rise in smartphone users has somehow quadruple since the device entered the market and also with latest technology such as 4G soon to be worldwide, there are still millions of people who prefer feature phone to smartphone but opt to this because of the apps, but now it seems they won't have to.