HTC First not sold out at AT&T as CEO claims

How do you get rid of a poor selling handset that was rumored to have sold only 10,000 units in its first month of availability? Cutting the price from $99.99 to 99 cents is one way to get the phones out of your warehouse. This is the situation that AT&T was faced with after the HTC First was launched in April. The only Android phone pre-installed with the Facebook Home launcher, the terrible reviews given to the launcher by those who installed it from the Google Play Store didn't help sales of the HTC handset.

It also didn't help that Facebook developers were too much into their Apple iPhones and didn't consider things like widgets that are a staple on Android, but are a no-no for iOS. Cover Feed might have made Facebook larger than life on Android home screens, but it wasn't what the people wanted. Rumors spread that AT&T was going to drop the phone and a planned launch in the U.K.was canceled by Facebook.

On Tuesday, after AT&T's top mobile executive Ralph de la Vega said that the carrier had sold out of the HTC First, it seemed that some sort of congratulations was in order. Considering that no other OEM wants to go near Facebook Home right now, all we can assume is that AT&T reps pushed a 99 cent phone. For 99 cents, the device is a good buy with a 4.3 inch screen and a 720 x 1280 resolution, leaving a strong 341ppi pixel density on a Super LCD 3 screen. And while it might be considered under-powered with a dual-core 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor under the hood, did we say this was 99 cents on contract?

But if you were planning on applauding AT&T for a job well done, better hold that applause. As it turns out, AT&T's own web site shows at least 50 stores in the New York City area still have the phone in stock and some are reporting that they have quite a few units left. 

source: CNET, BGR