Thursday, May 9, 2013

The HTC Facebook Phone Is Now a Buck

Well, that didn’t take long. You may recall Facebook Home, the heavily modified Android experience launched by the world’s most popular social network a little over a month ago.

While Facebook Home is available for download on several existing Android handsets, Facebook also partnered with HTC to launch a midrange smartphone preloaded with Home – the HTC First. The phone went on sale for $99 with a two-year contract through AT&T and became available on April 12.

Now, less than a month later, AT&T has dropped the price of HTC First to $0.99 with a two-year contract.

Surely, this means the end of Facebook Home as we know it, right? What a flop, huh? It’ll probably ruin all of Facebook in general, too, and we’ll all go back to using Friendster.

Or not. “We do promotions like this all the time,” AT&T’s Mark Siegel told AllThingsD’s Ina Fried.
Of course, the reviews for Facebook Home in the Google Play store haven’t exactly been mind-blowing, but these are still early days for software that Mark Zuckerberg himself promised would be updated monthly.

If I were a betting man – and I’m not – I’d bet that people have probably gone into the AT&T store, seen the HTC First, and decided to pony up an extra $100 for a higher-end Android handset knowing they could just load Facebook Home onto it anyway. At $0.99, the HTC First becomes a much, much, much more compelling phone, though, so it’ll be interesting to see if people start walking around with these things.

Sources :
http://techland.time.com/2013/05/08/the-htc-facebook-phone-is-now-a-buck/

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