Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

AT&T to Discontinue 'Facebook Phone' HTC First?

Good Riddance...

The quick and appropriate death of the bloatware phone...no surprise here. Also no surprise about it not being wildly popular as an Android add-on either. Most Android phones don't have the hardware to make their inefficient OS run smoothly as is, so why make things worse by adding face books resource-hogging interface on top of the already bloated GUI?

Poor planning all around.
 
HVDynamo said:
Hahahaha, no. I don't like them at all. They get in the way. Here's an idea, maybe include an option to have them or not. What ever happened to the days of options allowing you to customize your experience.
Click to expand...
Isnt there an option to turn them off?

----------
Reach9 said:
And what are the downsides of Facebook, apart from privacy? Just curious.
Click to expand...
Its really more of a "haters gonna hate" type of thing more than anything else.
 
When I was at the store looking at it, the sales folks said nobody bought them except for a few parents for their kids to use.

I'm not surprised at this turn of events.
 
JoeG4 said:
QFT. THIS A THOUSAND TIMES OVER!!!!

I can't believe they haven't learned their lesson from losing their marketshare so wildly. Oh, and the HTC Cha Cha (prior facebook phone).

I doubt that piece of crap will ever see anything more than possibly 1 security update.
Click to expand...

I had the ChaCha just last year. It wasn't a terrible phone in all fairness; the performance was reasonable for the price and the phone itself felt solid too. It was made of primarily metal and some plastic, but that plastic didn't creak or anything.

But.

The internal memory was only ~140MB. I'm not even sure it let you put apps on the microSD card. And there was virtually no community for it, no S-OFF, nothing. The HTC Dev unlock was out for it and there were about five ROMs made for the device, but those were just as well supported as the device itself.

It got one update while I owned it. And that wasn't to the OS itself, it was to update some of HTC's crap. To this day the phone is stuck on Gingerbread.

Plus a lot of apps didn't scale to the tiny landscape screen properly because Android just isn't built to do that. It actually worked by forcing the OS into landscape mode all the time, so all the apps thought they were on a normal phone that was being held sideways. Obviously this didn't work with any app that didn't respond to accelerometers. Not that any of this mattered since you couldn't fit any apps on the phone anyway.

The keyboard on the ChaCha was awful too. The buttons kept getting stuck, response from them was virtually non-existant (I often didn't even know if I'd pressed the keys properly), and as with every HTC, battery life was terrible.

IMHO, that phone had potential. I like phones with physical keyboards and this was before BB10, so I got that hoping for a decent Android keyboard phone. But I later realised, there's no such thing as a decent Android keyboard phone, none of the manufacturers for Android phones give a crap about that market anymore. Ah well, more power to BlackBerry.

Anyway, my point is, HTC have good ideas but flawed execution. I used to like their phones because the design was awesome and I actually didn't mind Sense. But the engineering on those things was always half-assed and they didn't bother supporting their phones well at all, and even when they do release updates, those are half-assed too (the ICS update for the Sensation... WTF was that?) and it let them down. The quality of their products has been steadily reducing over the years and while the One may be a lot better, no one will ever know because they're already virtually bankrupt at this point and consumers by and large have been put off of them now.
 
Last edited:
At first I thought they were talking about some old model smart phone until I realized it was brand new. :lol:
 
logged in just to upvote sparrky

as for jdechko - sparrky, wish I could give you more than 1 upvote.
 
I'm a bit surprised that it did so badly; I can understand the poor uptake of Facebook Home for existing Android users, but for someone looking to get into smart phones for Facebook on the move, which is actually quite a lot of people, then I thought it might have done better.

That said, I personally feel that Chat Heads are the best feature of the set, and you can get those just by installing Facebook's Messenger app, so anything that makes it awkward for use as a home screen does it no favours.
 
So... uh... are you implying that people actually DON'T want to "receive advertisement for free" on their phones? :D
 
jmgregory1 said:
I wonder if anyone on FB is talking about this now? The whole FB phone idea is nothing more than FB's overinflated perception of its own self worth.


I expect, at some point in the near future, a backlash against FB or at least a major defection of users or non-use by formerly avid FBer's.
Click to expand...


Since FB went public, their main criticism from Wall Street was that they didn't have any monetization of the mobile market via ads. I suspect this was their attempt to get that push into mobile.

As to your prediction... it's already happening. It was recently reported that FB lost over 6 million subscribers and that number could grow.
 
Happy it failed

:) I guess Im not expecting a lot of agreement

Shame HTC went along for the ride but Im pleased it failed. Im on FB, but have no desire for more integration, in fact I want less. Hopefully itll stay the same on IOS, an app I can open if wanted, and then close when done.

Sadly for Mark Z and a lot of investors, I dont need an integrated "Life - FB" experience or want it.

Heres hoping another social network starts up, becomes popular and remains what it popular for in the first place. ie the direct opposite to FB.
 
xdhd350 said:
Since FB went public, their main criticism from Wall Street was that they didn't have any monetization of the mobile market via ads. I suspect this was their attempt to get that push into mobile.

As to your prediction... it's already happening. It was recently reported that FB lost over 6 million subscribers and that number could grow.
Click to expand...

Facebook will always be around. They hit a critical mass of users across all age ranges *before* they started littering the site with ads and videos.

If nothing else, people will keep a facebook account around for long lost whomevers to have a way to contact them.

Yes, facebook's growth is ultimately limited. They need to make the transition from a website to a platform (whether that platform is for message, phone calls, selling items, etc).

Their problem is that they are trying to center everything around their website.

I don't mind going to amazon to find a book or a battery that I need.... nor do i mind hitting up google for new searches, shopping searches, etc... Those sites are reasonably designed for those purposes.

I do have a serious problem with logging into facebook and having to trudge through my aunt's posts, or old classmate baby pictures if I am interested in trying to find out when my favorite band's concert is.

Even the heavy hitters (google, microsoft, amazon) have ventured out into mobile with hardware to stake out territory.

Mark my words....FB will eventually have to sell themselves out to make more money (if they haven't already). They are only a juggernaut when it comes to social networking page hits...and absolutely nobody I know pays money to fb.
 
jmgregory1 said:
I wonder if anyone on FB is talking about this now? The whole FB phone idea is nothing more than FB's overinflated perception of its own self worth.
I expect, at some point in the near future, a backlash against FB or at least a major defection of users or non-use by formerly avid FBer's.
Click to expand...

Yep, Yep and Yep

and It'll serve em right.
 
not surprised FB stinks now with all their updates and the ads they are forcing on people, I have basically stopped using it.

I still can not believe that Zuckerberg is worth Billions over this thing, I mean really did anyone expect their new Home Look to take off, people do not want to have crap forced down their throat.
 
Not a bad looking phone. But still find no use for a Facebook dedicated phone. I don't even browse Facebook like a use to.
 
Facebook Home looks gorgeous... if all your friends are professional photographers. But in the real world, it will look like garbage.
 
verniesgarden said:
seriously? It's been out a month, that's not even long enough fro most stores to get stock
Click to expand...

I really doubt that people were lining up for this device, the previous HTC device that had the Facebook button was discontinued quickly as well due to poor sales. Can't say I'm surprised.
 
Facebook is for "Old People"

My teenage daughter and ALL of her friends have not touched Facebook in well over a year ... Facebook - at least in the U.S. - has jumped the shark. I doubt that this "flop" is a surprise to anyone.... at least anyone who follows tech trends closely.
 
xdhd350 said:
Since FB went public, their main criticism from Wall Street was that they didn't have any monetization of the mobile market via ads. I suspect this was their attempt to get that push into mobile.

As to your prediction... it's already happening. It was recently reported that FB lost over 6 million subscribers and that number could grow.
Click to expand...

Lost over 6M subscribers? Source?
 
nia820 said:
Not a bad looking phone. But still find no use for a Facebook dedicated phone. I don't even browse Facebook like a use to.
Click to expand...

You can turn Home off on it in three steps, though.

I'm curious to pick one up now, just to have an Android device to fiddle with that is actually a somewhat attractive item at a decent size.

Plus, I could probably sell it one day as some sort of rare collector's item. Never underestimate the collectors.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back