“The HTC First, or ‘Facebook phone’ as many prefer to call it, is officially a flop,” Zach Epstein reports for BGR.
MacDailyNews Take: HTC Worst.
“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,” Epstein reports. “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.”
Epstein reports, “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.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Kintastic! The failure of this device means that, as difficult as it may be to believe, there’s still a glimmer hope. The Idiocracy may be further off than we would have thought before this news.
It makes us smile to think that hardly anybody wanted a mid-range phone focused on Facebook.
Related articles:
AT&T cuts ‘Facebook phone’ price to 99-cents just weeks after launch – May 9, 2013
Why Facebook Home is good for Apple – April 7, 2013
Why Facebook Home will blow Android into smithereens – April 5, 2013
Horace Dediu: ‘Facebook Home can only reside on Android because only Google was daft enough to allow it’ – April 5, 2013
Facebook’s new ‘Home’ promises to ‘make any Android phone a Facebook phone’ – April 4, 2013