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Is AT&T already ready to wave goodbye to the HTC First?

The HTC First, the so-called 'Facebook Phone,' could soon be axed by AT&T, according to a new report. 

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HTC
The HTC First was dubbed the 'Facebook phone.'
  • By Matthew Shaer

The shelf-life of the HTC First may be very short indeed. 

According to a new report in BGR, AT&T has decided to yank the so-called "Facebook phone" from stores after only a couple weeks of "shockingly bad sales." BGR doesn't have a lot of specifics, but a "trusted source" told the tech site that "AT&T sold fewer than 15,000 units nationwide through last week," when the carrier decided to slash the price of the Android-powered HTC First from $99.99 to 99 cents.

That would be an extremely grim number indeed. (By comparison, Apple sold five million iPhone 5s in the first weekend that device was on sale. Granted, that five million was worldwide sales, though we imagine US sales constituted a big chunk of the pie.)  

In a statement released to BGR, an AT&T spokesperson maintained that the company has "made no decisions on future plans." That could be a hedge, or it could mean that AT&T will discontinue the HTC First in the future, or it could mean they won't discontinue the HTC First at all. For what it's worth, the BGR stands by its "trusted source." Why waste time and advertising energy on a poorly-performing product when you could be flogging a hot device like the Galaxy S4? 

The HTC First was unveiled last month to middling reviews. It was distinctly middle-of-the-road, with an average processor, an average screen, and an average camera. The big selling point was that the HTC First would be the first device to come pre-equipped with Facebook Home, a suite of Android apps. 

The First, one reviewer wrote, was "a decent choice for the money, and [the phone is a] decent choice if you can't be bothered to load the Facebook Home suite onto a different Android phone. But you can get the Samsung Galaxy S III for the same price as the First, and that gets you a bigger screen, a microSD card slot, a better camera, and Samsung's TouchWiz UI layer." 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

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