“The HTC First, or ‘Facebook phone’ as many prefer to call it, is officially a flop. It certainly wasn’t a good sign when AT&T dropped the price of HTC’s First to $0.99 just one month after its debut, and now BGR has confirmed that HTC and Facebook’s little experiment is nearing its end. BGR has learned from a trusted source that sales of the HTC First have been shockingly bad. So bad, in fact, that AT&T has already decided to discontinue the phone. Our source at AT&T has confirmed that the HTC First, which is the first smartphone to ship with Facebook Home pre-installed, will soon be discontinued and unsold inventory will be returned to HTC.” Wow. That’s pretty bad – but not unexpected.
They should’ve made this one aluminum too (and possibly silver as well), then they would’ve had sheeple lined up around the block, praising its build quality and ‘sex appeal’.
Edited 2013-05-13 22:31 UTC
+1000 points to you good sir. Build quality for slate phones doesn’t particularly matter that much. If these things had keyboards, I’d understand. Only reason why I didn’t get a Palm Pre II was the keyboard’s lack of quality.
If they actually could make it they would.
Who wouldn’t want Apple’s profit and profit-margin?
The real sheeples are people who actually believe apple makes nothing more than a shiny box.
You have no idea that you are the sheeple. Other people just buy what’s the best value for them.
Which for most sheeple are Android phones.
(I don’t like iOS nor Apple, nor Android nor Google for that matter)
How do we get hold of this 99c phone, root it and load customer ROMS to it?
I have a budget of money and time for this.
It’s a contract deal..
And you had to spoil the good feelings
Even E.T. couldn’t phone home with this one.
It must have sold about as well as the E.T. Game on the Atari 2600…
Wasn’t the main problem that E.T. Game sold too well? (on the name alone, and left too many people very disappointed)
Tsss. The real reason for this failure is that the carrier – AT&T – has zero interest in selling a phone that eats into its baseline revenue: SMS. Who believes the bad sales have anything to do with Facebook Home or the HTC First being bad? Carriers can make or break a phone, that’s the reality of this industry.
Actually, Verizon and AT&T have moved to very data centric plans in which you buy a bucket of data that is shared amongst all devices on the account, unlimited voice minutes, unlimited SMS, and free tethering to encourage you to buy bigger buckets or to incur overage fees. In the post-paid sector (where this phone was sold), no one even thinks about SMS anymore.
Mind you, the individual and family plans still have metered SMS, but I know of no one who doesn’t just get the Unlimited add-on. Your choice is 20 USD/mo unlimited or 0.20 USD/sms.
SMS is just a ruse these days in the US. “Look how much unlimited you get now! Unlimited SMS! Unlimited voice!” Never mind usage of those two items is down, hard, in the post-paid sector.
Data is the cash cow now. Especially with LTE finally making YouTube/Netflix viewing for the kids in the back of your SUV a Real Thing(TM) in urban and suburban areas. Fortunately, they’ve stolen the Fair & Flexible model that Sprint had a while ago, and instead of paying some insane amount per MB (0.39 USD) you’re overages are something like 15 USD per 1 GB block over. Not a big deal, a lot less surprising and scary, but still so expensive it isn’t even funny.
And there was much rejoicing… Do we really want facebook spreading throughout Android like a parasite?
http://tapastic.com/episode/3453
Edited 2013-05-14 11:13 UTC