Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook phone

The funny thing about covering product launches is that sometimes everyone involved knows said product is going to be a failure. That’s easy to say more than a decade removed from the unveiling of the HTC First — aka the Facebook Phone — but it also was pretty apparent in the room that day at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, Calif.

Start with the fact that the phone leaked out a couple days earlier. I can’t remember if that was the time a leak occurred while I was literally on a plane on the way to the event. (That sort of soul-crushing thing happened more times than I like to remember.) While I didn’t have any sort of personal stake in the phone or the event, if I was going to leave my family and fly across the country, work my ass off for a day and then take a red eye back home, I didn’t want what I was going to see to leak out ahead of time anymore than the companies did.

But sometimes that’s the job. And so I did the job. Found my way to 1 Hacker Way (now 1 Meta Way). Facebook had the pretty standard Silicon Valley breakfast spread — boxed water was new to me — while we waited for the event. Sadly, the Android Central coverage of the event has been lost to the sands of time.

You sort of get a feeling of how much firepower is being thrown at something by the executives on hand. And there’s a balance there. Too few execs and it should have just been a press release. Too many, though, and you start to think that they’re overcompensating. This one had the heads of Facebook, HTC, and AT&T all in one place. In hindsight, the addition of Mark Zuckerberg is what made it feel more over-the-top than previous events. Phone companies and the major operators like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile had been holding joint events for years by this point.

But that only served to contrast what we were being told with what we were holding in our hands that much more. It was a pretty basic black slab phone with Facebook taking the lead atop the otherwise good-for-the-time HTC customization of the Android operating system.

In any event, it was the first time I was in a room with Zuckerberg. He definitely looked a lot younger in 2013. We all did. I remember him being lit pretty well — that’s not always a given at these events.

This also wasn’t the only time I’d be at an event with Zuckerberg. Long before Meta purchased Oculus, he showed up at a Samsung event in Berlin. But this one definitely was the closest, most intimate event.

Shame about the phone, though.