As Emil posted on the Friending Facebook ZDNet blog there is a rumor that AT&T may be killing the HTC Status Facebook phone after just a month. You may recall that both myself and my teen daughter took a look at the device and thought it would appeal to Facebook users looking for something more than a feature phone.
AT&T seemed to have it priced right at $50 and it is a rock solid piece of hardware. I found the display to be quite small for the Android OS, but it was a very usable device and I am a bit surprised that it isn’t doing better at AT&T. I wonder if Facebook had gotten behind the device a bit more publicly if it would have done better.
The one concern I had about a phone like this with a button dedicated to someone else’s service is what would happen when that service changed. We see that Facebook just killed Places and in particular the mobile-only Facebook Places functionality. You will now be able to add your location to anything from anywhere so a smartphone is not required.
The issue with the HTC Status may be that a press and hold of the Facebook button currently checks you in with Facebook Places and if this is killed off then what does this press and hold do on the device? When you tie buttons to other services, then companies like HTC will likely have to issue software updates to fix things when the service changes.
Matthew Miller started using a Pilot 1000 in 1997 and has been writing news, reviews, and opinion pieces ever since.
Disclosure
Matthew Miller
Matthew is a professional naval architect by day and a mobile gadget freak at all other times. He purchases his own devices and then sells them on eBay or Craigslist to buy more. Many other devices are sent for review on a 30-day loaner basis and then returned to the carrier or manufacturer. If any are provided as “long term loaner units” this will be clearly disclosed in his reviews.
Biography
Matthew Miller
Matthew Miller started using a mobile devices in 1997 and has been writing news, reviews, and opinion pieces ever since. He is a co-host with GigaOM's Kevin Tofel on the MobileTechRoundup podcast and an author of three Wiley Companion series books. Matthew started using mobile devices with a US Robotics Pilot 1000 and has owned over 125 different devices running Palm, Linux, Symbian, Newton, BlackBerry, iOS, Android, webOS, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone operating systems. His current collection includes an HTC Radar 4G, Dell Venue Pro, Apple iPad 2, HTC Flyer, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Nokia N9, Apple iPhone 4S, MacBook Pro, and many more, along with tons of accessories and classic devices like the Apple Newton MessagePad 2100 and Sony CLIE UX50. Matthew can be found on various discussion forums under the user name of "palmsolo".
