Social media feels like a core part of life these days, but there was a time when it was still a fresh idea that people were excited about. Smartphone companies were searching for the “next big thing,” and for a brief period, one of the biggest social networks on the planet decided it needed its own phone.
The First Was Not the First
In February 2011, Facebook and HTC announced the Status (recently featured in a Mr. Mobile video). It was a BlackBerry-like device with a physical keyboard and a dedicated button to launch Facebook. However, this was not a true “Facebook Phone.” That honor goes to the HTC First, launched two years later. The First was significant because it featured a new user interface called “Facebook Home.”
At its core, the HTC First was a mid-range Android phone that came pre-loaded with Facebook Home and all of its Facebook-focused software gimmicks. The hardware showcased HTC’s usual polished, minimalist style, but the camera wasn’t very good, it was slow, and it was locked to AT&T. Despite being cheap ($99 on contract), it sold remarkably poorly.
Within a month of its April 2013 release, AT&T reportedly had sold fewer than 15,000 units of the HTC First. It was on multiple lists of the biggest tech failures of 2013. Sales were so bad that AT&T slashed the price from $99 to an embarrassing $0.99. The phone launched with Android 4.1.2 and never received another major update after that. There was also never another “Facebook Phone.”
What Made This Phone So Weird?
Obviously, the Facebook-ness of this phone was its biggest selling point and weakness, but there was also something surprising underneath it all. In the end, Facebook Home weirdly inspired a feature that’s now built-in as part of the Android operating system.
Facebook Home’s main gimmick was the Cover Feed, which replaced your lock screen and home screen with a never-ending stream of photos and status updates from your News Feed. You didn’t even have to unlock your phone to browse, like, or comment on posts. Notifications, calendar alerts, and even missed calls were treated as floating Facebook updates.
The First also introduced Chat Heads, which allowed you to keep up with conversations with floating circular icons that sat on top of whatever app you were using. Android now includes a feature called “Chat Bubbles” that supports a wide range of messaging apps, and it’s essentially the exact same thing as Chat Heads.
As mentioned, Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean was running under this heavy Facebook layer, but the weird thing was that there was an option in the settings to turn off Facebook Home. Once disabled, you had a nearly pure stock Android experience similar to a Nexus at the time. It didn’t even have a bunch of AT&T bloatware apps. This little “hack” ended up being one of the last selling points of the HTC First, but it wasn’t enough to save it.
The HTC First was not alone in trying to leverage social media to sell smartphones in the early 2010s. Ultimately, these integrations never quite worked out because they were often clunky, slow, and redundant. Why bother buying a “Facebook Phone” when you could buy literally any other phone on the market and just install the actual Facebook app? The argument that phones like the HTC First offered an “elevated” social media experience just wasn’t something people cared about. Still, it’s fun to look back at these weird devices and remember a time when we didn’t know what we were doing.
Sources: Wikipedia, Facebook, The Verge