Well, this didn’t take long. AT&T has decided to pull the plug on the HTC First ‘Facebook phone’ after only being on the market for a few weeks. According to a trusted source obtained by BGR, the First is getting canned due to “shockingly bad” sales.
This should come to no one’s surprise considering the scathing reports that were suggesting pedestrian sales numbers, which made AT&T drop the price of the phone to a meager $0.99 — beginning the whispers of the HTC First being the social giants first official flop. In turns out that those reports might have been correct given how true this BGR source is.
The second largest wireless provider in the U.S. will drop the device and return all unsold inventory back to HTC. Ouch. The site didn’t give any specifics on how much unsold inventory was left over, but their source confirmed that AT&T sold fewer than 15,000 units nationwide. So we’d expect a hefty amount of handsets still sitting around in stores.
In fact, these sales figures are so bad, the First has outdone 2011’s HTC Chacha. The phone hasn’t been well received from customers nor AT&T employees. Apparently, no one cares for the handset. AT&T won’t pull the phone from its display until HTC’s in-store display contract for the First expires.
This is a bad sign for Facebook and HTC as both companies try to jock for its place in the lucrative mobile device market. Facebook will have to go back to the drawing board to make Facebook Home more compelling for Android, while HTC has to come out with that next impressive device to go along side the One.
[via bgr]