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Facebook Home Flagship Phone, HTC First, May Be Discontinued
zacharye writes "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. How much unsold inventory is there? We don’t have an exact figure, but things aren’t looking good. According to our source, AT&T sold fewer than 15,000 units nationwide through last week when the phone’s price was slashed to $0.99."
They should have charged extra and made them sign up for a waiting list.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
its not samsung
the smartphone market is Apple and Samsung control more than 95% of the market. everyone else is table scraps
Every phone is already integrated into facebook to a certain degree. If this were the only phone to ever allow you to see or update facebook, then yes it would be a smashing success. However, it is not. Even the marquee feature of the the "facebook home launcher" is available on other phones. There is nothing the phone can do that others can not.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I don't have facebook and I network just fine, you know by talking to people and shit. About the only people who ask me about facebook are women, and I just get an "oh" back when I say I don't have one.
So, in conclusion: facebook is for 13 year olds, family, and posers (I went to the bar last night check out how badass I am). None of my family uses it making it a complete waste of time.
Can anybody name me a smartphone that doesn't have Facebook integration already? It's hard to build a phone around a killer feature when literally every competitor already has that feature.
I read the internet for the articles.
Everybody hates Facebook - they only use it because everyone else does and they have to use it to keep in touch.
If Facebook actually did anything useful, I'd see the point in signing up. As it is, it's just a way to harvest marketing data without providing anything in return that is actually useful. Its UI is horrible, the function it serves is nonexistent, the company is abusive, and the CEO is hostile.
The emperor has been going full monty for several years now.
The way I see it, the facebook brand is in a similiar position to the Windows brand. They're popular in the sense that they're ubiquitous, but not in the sense that they elicit passion. Unlike, for instance, Apple, you won't see "facebook fanboys" who'll defend the site to the death. It's used because just about everyone knows someone on it (as you said, the networking effects), but not because it has any particular strength or marketing genius.
The question you need to ask yourself is that if all of a sudden facebook was replaced by another website fulfilling similar/identical needs, would people care? I think not. If you asked the same for Apple, though, I think a lot of people would cry out at their iDevices being taken away. That, right there, is brand power.
Because, really, there was never a 'Facebook' phone in the first place. It was just an annoying app launcher that should never have been bundled with a phone. This also demonstrates the sheer power that the default app launcher has to make or break perfectly fine hardware. Even though the customer can easily replace the launcher, bundling a phone with a messed up launcher basically destroys sales of the phone.
Vendors try to lock people into these sorts of things all the time, it just usually isn't quite so blatant and most people don't even realize that it is happening. Buy a Motorola phone and you get some minor but interesting stuff that is generic but locked into the platform (can't be downloaded and run on other android phones). Same with all vendors, but they have to tread carefully or risk alienating their entire user base. The FB stuff was so in-your-face that even a 5-year-old could turn away from the foul stench.
-Matt
What's powerful about it?... My wife uses it but mostly because her friends are on it.
I love when people answer their own questions.
The GP post said Facebook had "powerful networking effects", which means, as explained by the Wikipedia:
In economics and business, a network effect (also called network externality or demand-side economies of scale) is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When network effect is present, the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it.
This being a GSM AT&T phone might be a big roadblock in you activating it on Sprint's CDMA network
Coming from the G1 and Desire Z, new HTC phones lack a lot of features:
-no replacable battery
-no trackpad
-no SD
-no keyboard
all these features are missing on any "modern" phone, the trend is to make all buttons disappear at the cost of screen real-estate. So when it was time to get a new phone I went for the one with the biggest screen and most of the disappearing features, I went for Samsung.
Smart people hate it and don't use it.
Some in the middle hate it, but use it because they fear being left out.
Morons love it it and use it.