HTC First Facebook smartphone won’t be making it to the UK

The HTC First, the Facebook phone that we’ve been waiting for years to finally become real, has gone from $99.99 to $0.99 to being rumored to get canned in just about one month. And it all seemed to be going so well during Facebook’s announcement in early April…

To add insult to injury, the HTC First will not be launching in the UK anymore. This despite the fact that pre-orders have already been taken for the device. It was supposed to be an EE exclusive, at least at first. And it was due in the UK in the next few months. But that won’t happen. Existing pre-orders have been cancelled, and the launch will simply never take place. The decision to not release the First in the UK after all has apparently been made by Facebook, not HTC.

The reason is said to do with the smartphone’s poor sales in the US, where it’s been available at AT&T for over a month. The carrier has slashed its price after just a few weeks, though, thus also fueling rumors about really bad sales numbers. Furthermore, AT&T may even stop selling the First altogether, according to some recent mumblings across the blogosphere. Now if the sales are really (that) bad, that would of course make sense.
It looks like the world wasn’t ready for a Facebook phone. Not yet, at least. Not for this iteration, anyway. But aside from being a Facebook-infused thing, the First is also a decent midranger, yet it seems like not many people took that into account. As for Facebook Home, the software running atop Android – it’s also available for other phones. And not many people are happy with it, if you go by the comments in the Google Play Store. It feels incomplete as a replacement launcher, because it takes away some functionality that people have been used to having in Android. This may or may not have something to do with Facebook employees and their love for all things Apple, or maybe they’re just bad at mobile apps (Facebook for iOS is a crashy mess too, though less so than its still horrible Android counterpart). via Mobile News and Engadget and gizmonnews.