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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'
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.
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.
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