The embattled Canadian phone maker BlackBerry may have found a financial saviour in Facebook, the world's largest social media company. Reports said that BlackBerry and Facebook officials met last week to discuss a possible buy-in.

CNET sees in BlackBerry's meeting several potential buyers as playing the field to get all types of potential buyers as it seeks the most attractive bidder. The initiative to talk with Facebook came from BlackBerry, CNET reported.

Facebook and BlackBerry declined to comment on the reported discussions between the two companies.

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The financially ailing company, which just axed another 300 positions, went officially on sale in September. Among the interested buyers are Fairfax Financial Holdings, Lenovo, former BlackBerry CEO Mike Lazaridis and former Apple CEO John Sculley.

CNET sees the Canadian phone firm's BBM as the reason why it would buy BlackBerry, not its phone making business which is a white elephant. The Wall Street Journal speculated that buying BlackBerry could open a door for Facebook to make another attempt to have its own phone line despite failure in its initial try via the Facebook Home mobile software.

Another attraction would be BlackBerry's patents, particularly its secure network technology as well as smartphone component patents estimated by analysts to be worth between $1 billion and $3 billion.

The last official figure from the Waterloo, Ontario-based firm is that it has 70 million subscribers, although the figure could have shrank because of news of the company's financial problems despite having $2.6 billion in cash and no debts.

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