No Home for the HTC First anywhere, it appears

With the release of the ‘Facebook Phone’ postponed, Chris Donkin reckons the social networking site should stick to what it does best

It was no great shock to see the HTC First, AKA the ‘Facebook Phone’, being pulled by EE in the UK given the lukewarm reception it received in the US.

As soon as carrier AT&T announced it was dropping the price to less than a dollar, the proverbial vultures were circling over HTC HQ, with the internet awash with rumours the US network was going to pull the device completely.

The key selling point – in fact the only selling point anyone mentioned at the handset’s announcement – was the fact it came with Facebook’s new interface Home built in.

Facebook Home was – and still is – available on a handful of high-end devices but the interface’s ‘flagship’ was always meant to be the First.

As with the handset Home has been panned, with very few positive comments on the Google Play Store and an underwhelming overall rating of two and a half stars out of five – compared to four and a half for Facebook Messenger.

To someone who has had a play with Home on the Galaxy S III the reaction came as no surprise. I got the distinct impression this was the social network taking over the handset completely and wondered if that’s what people really wanted.

The app sits above the Android system, bombarding you with Facebook updates from ‘friends’ and anyone else on your Facebook news feed even while the phone lock screen is on.

In what felt like quite an intrusive feature, if someone sends you a Facebook message, an image of their head appears above whatever you are doing alerting you to the fact.

Staff at the Home/HTC First launch were enthusiastically saying this was an immersive social experience, but it just felt a little too much and, though they wouldn’t admit it, there must be a detrimental effect to battery life constantly downloading everything on your newsfeed.

Taking on Home and making it central to the handset was always a risk for HTC – especially when you consider it has been burned before by the HTC ChaCha and Salsa which bombed on release in 2011.

Perhaps it’s time Facebook stuck to what it knows best – although given its recent history, it may no longer have a choice.

We suspect Twitter won’t be making the same moves any time soon.

FitStar Raises $4M Round Led By Trinity To Make The Best iPad-Led Home Workouts

FitStar, the San Francisco-based startup that just launched a workout app with Atlanta Falcons tight end Tony Gonzalez, just raised $4 million in a round led by Trinity Ventures to expand its line-up of fitness apps. Earlier investors like Google Ventures also participated.

The round was put together a few months ago before the company launched its flagship app earlier this month. CEO Mike Maser, who came up with the idea while traveling solo out in New Zealand, isn’t sharing specific stats yet on retention or the size of the company’s user base because it’s only been a few weeks. But he did say that users have burned at least a collective 4 million calories through the app.

Maser said the deal with Trinity came together in part because the firm had really been looking for a mobile health-related play for a while.

“They are smart, just genuinely good folks with high integrity,” he said. “They’ve been looking at the space for a long time and they were hungry to make an investment in consumer health. There was a just instant simpatico in what they were looking for in an investment and what we were looking for in a new partner.”

FitStar’s first app is a video workout app where Gonzalez leads users through several dozen exercises that can all be done without the assistance of any equipment or a gym. Unlike classic DVD or home video workouts, the app responds to the user and customizes the difficulty of the exercises based on their fitness level. There’s a simple diagnostic questionnaire at the beginning and then the app will raise the difficulty level over time depending on how committed the user is to the regime.

Since launch, the app was featured in the “Editor’s Choice” category by Apple, and stayed in the top 100 apps for about a week. It’s still sitting in the top 5 for the “Health and Fitness” category in the U.S. That’s pretty normal though because the top free ranks tend to be dominated by games and social networking apps, not health and fitness or productivity titles.

Maser said to expect an iPhone version of the app next. He’s still quiet on when the company will eventually come out with workout apps targeted at different demographics with other fitness celebrities.

FitStar has a freemium monetization model with paid versions that give the user more workouts per week, nutritional guidance and e-mail support. The prices of those paid subscription add-ons range from $4.99 to $11.99 per month.

The other component of the business will be merchandising. FitStar also just opened up a store with branded apparel and books on nutrition. They’re also partnering with companies like Kiip, a mobile rewards startup, to offer free Amazon MP3s and other goodies to FitStar users.

“We offer a high fidelity experience that should appeal to apparel makers and food and beverage companies,” Maser said.

FitStar is also backed by Advancit Capital, a VC firm from Viacom and CBS Corporation vice chairman Shari Redstone, and Floodgate.