I can't see this as anything other than bad management.

Even if they didn't mean to go down this road for the long run, this would have sold in buckets. The market is always hungry for new and different, and there's been very little new since Android ate the market. Curiosity alone would have sold a million devices. Further more, this is to me a low end smartphone, not a low end phone. There's a possibility this might have created a niche in the price range of the crappiest android phones.

Bleh. Management failure.