So AT&T just took the HTC First (you know, the "Facebook phone") and dropped the price from $99.99 down to ninety-nine cents. Ninety. Nine. Cents. Two weeks after launch. I saw it on a forum thread this morning and laughed out loud at my desk, which probably wasn't fair to the poor engineers who built the thing, but come on.
I want to be clear I'm not gloating over hardware, I'm gloating over the idea behind it. Facebook Home wasn't really a phone, it was a launcher: this "Chat Heads" and cover-feed overlay that sat on top of Android and tried to make your entire phone experience be Facebook first, everything else second. I installed the standalone Home app on my Nexus 4 the week it came out because I'm a sucker for trying new stuff on this blog, and I gave it four days before I ripped it back off. Four days. My battery was garbage, notifications were a mess, and every time I wanted to just check the time or open Chrome I had to fight through a giant photo of somebody's brunch first. It's not that the visual polish was bad, it actually looked pretty nice, glossy, very "we hired real designers this time." It's that it assumed I want Facebook to be the operating system of my life, and I really, really don't.
And apparently almost nobody else did either. The HTC First only came in AT&T stores, only in a couple of colors, and from what I've read the sell-through numbers were bad enough that stores started pulling it off shelves entirely. A dollar is basically AT&T admitting the experiment failed and they just want the inventory gone. I don't think this kills Facebook's ambitions on your home screen forever, but it's a pretty blunt signal that "put our app chrome over the whole OS" is not a thing people were asking for.
Contrast that with what's actually been flying off shelves this week: the Galaxy S4. I walked past three different carrier stores in the last few days and every single one had a line, or at least a cluster of people standing around a demo unit poking at Smart Scroll and Air Gesture like it was a magic trick. I'm skeptical of half those gimmick features honestly (waving your hand over the screen to scroll never seems to work reliably in any demo I've watched, in-store or on video) but the base spec sheet is legitimately great, and Samsung clearly understands marketing spectacle in a way that a lot of Android OEMs still don't.
The other small thing worth mentioning from this week: Apple tickets for WWDC sold out in something like two minutes when they went on sale. Two minutes! I didn't even have the page loaded before my browser tab told me registration was closed. I know a couple of people who've gone the last few years and they all say it's basically part conference, part line-standing endurance event, but there's something almost quaint about a company selling out a developer conference faster than most bands sell out an arena show. Says a lot about where the energy in this industry currently sits, even if I'm a little bitter I'll be watching the keynote stream from my couch again in June like every other year.
Anyway. Between the AT&T fire sale, the Galaxy S4 lines, and everyone still scrambling to figure out where their RSS feeds are going once Google Reader dies in July (I moved to Feedly a few weeks back and it's fine, importing my OPML took about ninety seconds and nothing broke, which honestly surprised me more than it should have), it's a pretty good little snapshot of who's winning and losing right now. Facebook tried to own the home screen and got humbled to pocket change in two weeks flat. Samsung just keeps grinding out phones people actually want to stand in line for. And Apple can apparently sell out a conference registration page faster than Ticketmaster sells out a stadium.
I still have Chat Heads installed as a standalone messaging thing, for what it's worth, that part I actually like, weirdly enough. Just not as my entire phone.