Don’t expect another Facebook phone anytime soon

Oct 9, 2015 11:48 GMT  ·  By

Remember that, a few years back, up-and-rising social media giant Facebook teamed up with HTC to produce the HTC First. While the handset didn’t feature a spectacular spec list, it did bring something unique to the table: the model was bundled with a pack of Facebook-specific features and had Facebook pre-installed out of the box.

However, the experiment proved to be a failure and soon the phone was made available for purchase for only $0.99 on contract, which is why the company is not really looking to produce a successor to the HTC First. At least according to Facebook’s Vice President of Messaging products Dave Marcus, who talked to CNET and said that the social network would “probably not” take up the endeavor of building another phone.

Most of us have probably already forgotten about the Facebook-branded phone and the company knows better than to persist in a niche where it has no prospects of succeeding.

Facebook is king of the mobile market, even without a phone

After all, Facebook’s products, including Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, are the apps that are most used by mobile users. So even if Facebook doesn’t have its own branded smartphone per se, it still has dominion over the mobile market, with 25% of the time spent on mobile phones dedicated to one of those applications.

If Facebook does decide one day that it needs another handset, it might want to choose the same approach as Google and a new partner other than HTC to build its next-gen device.

Now, if you don’t mind a trip back memory lane, the HTC First arrived on the market in April 2013, which is two years ago. The phone was launched with a 4.3-inch display with 720 x 1280 pixel resolution (342 ppi) and extracted life from a Snapdragon 400 processor with Adreno 305, all in combination with 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage.

The HTC First also featured a primary 5MP camera with autofocus and LED flash and a secondary 1.6MP one. It shipped out with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean with Facebook Home UI on top.

As you can see, the device was pretty plain, so it’s no wonder customers weren’t too keen on picking it up.