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AT&T hints to abandon the HTC First Facebook Phone

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The app, Facebook Home was originally launched with an intention of turning Android phones roughly into a Facebook phone, but this app seems to be struggling in the market right now. Among the 16,000 odd reviews it received, more than 50 percent rated it with just one star which is possibly the lowest grade an app has received so far.

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The AT&T has reportedly been planning to drop this Android based HTC First or the Facebook Phone entirely from their lineup and ship back the remaining unsold inventory to HTC. After it was introduced during the first week of April, the device was priced at $99 but seeing a very disappointing market response, the price drastically dropped to 99 cents. Although the reports of AT&T planning to abandon the device is still not confirmed yet, however, if the reports are true, then Facebook must still be debating on the subject of responding to the very poor reception Facebook Home received from the commercial market. However, we are still yet to receive a word from the representatives of AT&T, Facebook and HTC about the new development in their plans and about the future of Facebook Phone.

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According to the market reports, the HTC First performed badly from the beginning and sources from one of the America’s largest carrier, AT&T reported that, after 30 days of its introduction in the market, the sales could not even reach up to 15,000 phones. However, if compared with other phones that AT&T carried, it sold 6m smartphones out of which 1m of them were Android phones within just 90days of their launch, which also forms the averages of selling approximately 300,000 per month.

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The second attempt of HTC for creating a unique Facebook Phone, the first being the HTC Chacha launched in the 2011 spring, seems to have failed miserably again. According to Richard Windsor of the RadioFreeMobile consultancy, AT&T has almost confirmed that the Facebook Phone has proved to be very unpopular among the users in its overall performances, which includes poor hardware, poor installations and poor software reviews. The most unpopular effect of Facebook Home is that it takes over the entire phone and pushes away the normal app at the background resulting in the home screen showing photos and comments from the Facebook News Feeds along with notification and chat heads.

Therefore, with this attempt resulting in poor response, Facebook must work harder to design a more user-friendly app, which could engage the users in a completely different and unique way.

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