The Fire Phone is now on sale for just $199 unlocked. It’s no secret that Amazon Fire phone is one of the company’s biggest failures. Amazon’s third quarter report mentioned $170 million worth of losses because of the experimental smartphone.
So for anyone who wants to take advantage of the latest offer, this is a great opportunity. More so because Amazon keeps the offer intact, meaning that you will receive it with a free year of Amazon Prime. The addition of Amazon’s Prime service actually makes the phone worth just $99.
On contract, the device is available for just $1 since September. Amazon decided to drastically cut the price when the smartphone’s appeal turned out to be much lower than expected. When it was first released in July, Amazon priced it at $199 with a two-year contract, a much higher price than everyone was expecting. Unlocked, the phone sold for $649.
Another nail in the coffin proved to be the initial AT&T exclusivity. But, in the meantime, Amazon decided to make Fire Phone available for other GSM carriers as well (Verizon and Sprint use CDMA). In September, the price for an unlocked device was $449. Now you can have it for just $199.
Amazon will now pay the cost of not getting the Fire Phone price right in the first place, a move acknowledged by David Limp, a company executive. Amazon will have a lot to learn from the experience. The lessons will be applied in the next generation of smartphones, because Amazon announced it will not give up on the idea so rapidly. However, the Fire Phone brand needs a clever revival strategy.
The ecommerce giant is famous for its Kindle lineup, the most popular line of e-readers. Fire Phone’s disastrous sale figures came as a surprise for everyone, analysts and consumers alike.
But besides the unfortunate pricing, Fire Phone presents other strange characteristics that convinced most inquiring users to back down. One would be a Fire Phone’s key selling points, the Dynamic Perspective. Four cameras placed on the device’s corners constantly record the user’s movements, as well as on its own sensors, to provide a hypnotizing 3D experience. Even if it looks like a cool feature, on a daily basis the characteristic proved to be irritating to some users. But the phone has a decent 2.2GHz quad-core processor paired with 2 GB of RAM, which turn it into a bargain if you are into Amazon’s ecosystem.