American network operator AT&T has reportedly opted to cut the HTC First from its roster just a month after the Facebook phone's launch following awful sales.
BGR has learned from a trusted source at AT&T that "sales of the HTC First have been shockingly bad," prompting the operator to remove the latest attempt to create a Facebook phone from its future plans.
HTC has an agreement in place with AT&T for the HTC First to be featured within its stores, but once this agreement expires the network giant will apparently remove the device from sale and return any unsold handsets to HTC.
And it seems as if there are a lot of unsold handsets. According to the source, AT&T has shifted just 15,000 HTC First handsets throughout the US in the last week - despite the fact that the operator had cut the price of the handset to just 99c.
Just to put the extent of this purported failure into context, this apparently means that the HTC First has sold worse than the HTC ChaCha - HTC's earlier failed attempt at a Facebook phone - back in 2011.
The report claims that AT&T's sales reps don't like the HTC First at all, and have been making little effort to push the device ahead of top sellers like the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the iPhone 5.
The HTC First was launched alongside the stand-alone Facebook Home app back at the beginning of April. It's a mid-range Android Jelly Bean phone running an even more deeply integrated version of the new Facebook launcher.
With a 4.3-inch 720p display, a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 CPU, and a 5-megapixel camera, the HTC First is hardly a high-end smartphone contender. But that doesn't mean that it's without appeal, with an attractively low price, solid build quality, and the potential to roll back to stock Android all marking it out for consideration.
It will be interesting to see how the HTC First fares when it launches in the UK this summer.
Check out what we think of the Facebook Home launcher app in our review.
