HTC First

~ how it landed ~

the HTC First was an at&t exclusive in the united states, and that carrier lock is most of the story about why it never touched me. There was no path from a Turkish shelf to this phone. It was carrier-coded and country-coded from birth, a device you could only get by walking into an american store in April 2013 and asking for the one nobody was asking for.

what made it a news item was not the hardware, which was a perfectly ordinary mid-range HTC. It was the software. The HTC First shipped with Facebook Home, a launcher that replaced your normal android home screen with a full-screen stream of your friends' posts and photos. Your lock screen was Facebook and your home screen was Facebook. The apps were pushed one layer down, behind the feed.

Facebook had decided the phone should be about people instead of apps, and this was the flagship for that idea. The idea did not survive contact with actual buyers.

~ the case file ~

~ the actual end ~

within a month of the April launch, reports said at&t had sold fewer than fifteen thousand of them. The carrier cut the price from ninety-nine dollars on contract to ninety-nine cents, which in phone terms is not a discount, it is a white flag. Not long after, at&t moved to discontinue it and unsold stock went back to HTC.

~ what it proved ~

Facebook Home itself was a free download for other phones, and it died on its own soon enough. But the HTC First is the tombstone people point at, because it was the one device that bet its entire identity on the idea. The lesson it left is simple and a little brutal. People were happy to spend hours a day inside Facebook, and they still did not want it to be the first thing they saw when they picked up the phone.

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