Slashdot Mirror
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'
The Facebook phone flops like few phones have ever flopped. Zuckerberg's lobbying group is collapsing like few lobbying groups have ever collapsed (http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/12/why-zuckerbergs-lobby-fwd-is-collapsing-like-a-house-of-cards-outside-of-dc/).
Many of us are stuck with Facebook due its powerful networking effects (much like AT&T in the old days). But still the FB brand is renowned as being member-abusive, terrible about privacy, cavalier about interface changes and wiping out settings, etc. Perhaps this is a sign that few people are interested in letting FB expand its grip on their lives.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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.
...the ONLY reason they have the number of users that they do is because everyone's friends are on Facebook.
People do not like Facebook. They hate the lack of security, the constant changing of format, the increasingly annoying advertising, etc, etc, etc.
One day (and I believe it will be soon), a viable alternative will appear and their collective mass of users will leave practically overnight.
No one loves Facebook. Its not cool. Its just where everyone is hanging until something better comes along.
Word game?
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 phone is actually very good. The hardware that is. If you stripped out Facebook Home you would basically have stock android on it. At .99 cents on contract thats a damn good buy if Cyanogen Mod supported it.
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
OIL, Coal, Microsoft Windows, inkjet printers, Fiat Currencies, cable television, pop with glucose/fructose. There are lots of things that people don't like, but merely put up with because they do not have (or perceive to have) a better alternative.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Is it normal for the carrier to not outright buy the phone until they sell it?
I don't know about phones, but in the distribution world, it is very common for a reseller to not actually buy a product before it is sold.
Many companies these days work on a virtual inventory basis with their primary supply chain. The basic idea is that the seller of the product effectively leases space in the warehouse to the supplier with a contract such that the supplier agrees to maintain a certain amount of virtual inventory. When the seller sells-through a product, they don't actually have to pay for the inventory until the second the unit is "pulled" from this hub and then the supplier bills the seller and is on the hook to replenish this inventory. Of course the seller discontinues that product, then it just never pulls any more units from hub and the supplier is left holding the bag (even though the inventory is in the seller's warehouse). On the sale, the seller often still has "net-90" days to pay for it as well. As you can see, the life of the supplier isn't easy, nowdays they need to pay for both the inventory and the account receivables side...
For the inventory on the shelf there is a similar paradigm, as part of the shelf stocking agreement, a repurchase agreement is made that the seller can require the supplier to purchase back some or all of the inventory (although usually at a discounted rate), if the inventory hasn't been sold in a certain number of days. This type of stock/repurchase agreements happens in industries far and wide, supermarkets to bookseller to electronic's retailers.
The rationale for the seller offering a high repurchase price and percentages is for the seller and supplier to maximise the amount of product on the shelves (to prevent out-of-stock sales loss) given the seller's risk tolerance for the product. Of course the supplier may be irrational, but the seller is covered a bit in this case... Usually the seller says I'll risk $X to stock your product on the shelf and the agreement is structured by the supplier that although $Y of inventory is stocked, $Y - #units X repurchase_price = $X.