It might be picked up as a budget device for customers who are willing to buy dirt cheap devices that didn't sell well during its production run. I can imagine the Fire phone joining products like the Canon EOS M in that category.
(The EOS M camera was panned by reviewers when it was released, for being unusably slow. Sales were horrible, and the price dropped like a rock from $899 to $250. However, Canon also released firmware updates that fixed a lot of the speed issues, so some people are buying it now as a great budget camera).
There are so, so many excellent inexpensive phones.
The Nokia Lumia 630 (€150 unlocked, probably free with most contracts) is an excellent phone for many, many people. There are so many excellent cheap Android phones. There is no need to pick up this mess from Amazon.
Joe Dealfinder can get a Moto G for $179 and get a monthly pre-paid plan for peanuts from a variety of carriers that he can leave at anytime, include budget resellers of the major carriers. He could walk away with a monthly $30-50 bill with lots of data, minutes, sms, etc.
Or he can get this jalopy, pay his extra monthly fee to pay for the actual phone, and then pick from a pricey non-prepaid plan while being locked to this one carrier. Even with modest data caps, he's looking at a near $100 monthly bill.
The dealfinders know these .99 cent phones are ripoffs in the long run.
I bought a Moto G (on Amazon!) last week for under $80...$40/month on Boost for an unlimited plan. For me, phones/plans have just about hit the sweet spot of value with this combo.
There isn't exactly a lack of such devices though. There is now a plethora of low-end Android devices that are actually very solid phones in their own right.
The EOS M achieved some redemption because there aren't any good mirrorless cameras in the $250 range, but there are IMO good Android phones even in the "next to free" price range.
Between the Fire Phone and the Moto G I'd probably still pick the Moto.
Amazon's timeframe for determining a product or service to be a "loss" is way, way longer than most understand. I wouldn't for a second believe that Amazon is slashing investment in this particular venture just because version 1 didn't sell like hotcakes.
Amazon doesn't want to defend this phone. It want to fix it, but it isn't ready to yet:
The most popular critical review on Amazon points out that the phone has features that are:
• Supposed to always work working very inconsistently;
• Features that are useful and expected in Android inconsistently implemented.
Plus it has no alternatives for many common apps. This implementation of the phone is broken. Amazon may or may not be able to iterate into a make of a better phone, but if it can't, this will be a loss.
Beyond music, videos, and books, how many people actually purchase products from their mobile devices? I know I don't, and have never seen my spouse or any friends do so, though I realize that's not a scientific survey.
Also, if they've only sold 10's of thousands of units as has been claimed recently, that doesn't seem like it translates into many additional sales, even if users are buying additional things on them. At least not compared with iOS or other Android platforms.
Safe to say, IMO. I have no idea why I would want this phone. The free-with-2-year-contract model is also hilariously outdated by now. Amazon imposing its own walled garden excluding Google's means your favorite apps are probably not there.
Kind of hard to say whether they won or lost considering they pulled the plug rather quickly. For me, this is pretty myopic. Unless they thought you could introduce a device, sell millions of them and get out with a bankable profit; which is pretty staggering logic when you think about it.
When companies do this is completely trashes the general public's confidence in a product. At least have some confidence in your equipment to take a few hits and keep moving forward.
i agree, this is a huge missed opportunity while damaging their reputation. I imagine if this 99cent price had been revealed at launch that the response would have been much greater.
Price drops do not necessarily mean that a product is being abandoned. The initial iPhone price was dropped signficantly only 2 months after it launched.
Amazon may have simply set a high price in the beginning to gauge demand, soak up any early-adopter profits, or mitigate initial high per-unit costs.
Consider that they are still spending a lot of money to advertise it. I saw multiple ads during Sunday Night Football last night, which is not cheap air time.
Not to mention that it's carrier exclusive. That only worked once, for the iPhone, and will likely never work that way again. Besides, AT&T has good coverage where I live, but I've heard that they are pretty bad in some metro areas, so they locked out a lot of potential customers from the start.
Maybe. There's no doubt this phone was a flop, but they've started product lines before with a clunker first release and then built from there. Amazon might not need these devices to be smash hits the way some other companies need that.
So about $600.99 then? What a bargain. The $449 price is cheaper than that. (Assuming you are on AT&Ts more recent plans where they charge you $25 more for having a subsidized, on-contract phone.)
No, it's $450.98. AT&T Next does not require down payment for a new phone, since they amortize the phone's cost over two years.
For an iPhone 5S you pay $0 up-front and 24 monthly payments of $27.09. Of course, $27.09 * 24 = $650.16, the unsubsidized phone price.
You can, of course, still buy phones on two-year contracts instead of paying monthly. In that case you'd pay $199 for an iPhone 5S, in addition to a (lower) contract hit.
The problem is with a new 2-year contract on an AT&T Family Plan you end up paying $15 - $25 more each month for the contract.
So for an iPhone 5S on a 2-year contract with a 10GB plan you pay $199 up front and then $25/mo for two years with a grand total of $799 over two years.
Yeah, I think they've done this to encourage customers to use AT&T Next instead of signing a 2-year contract. Purchasing a phone with AT&T Next, then foregoing the upgrade, is exactly the same as the old-school 2-year contract.
This is what keeps me from taking them up on this offer. I would absolutely extend my T-mobile contract for 2 years to try this phone, but AT&T is a huge dealbreaker.
The Kin should have been called the Contractual Obligation Phone. Microsoft had to give it to Verizon, but they were really late. Verizon had to take it, but they didn't push it.
I went to a Verizon store when Kin shipped (Kin was developed by my old team, so I wanted to see it) and I couldn't get a rep to pull one out of a box to show it to me.
I know someone in MSR that ended up with a truckload of them; they're reflashed and used for lots of little things. Kind of a neat second life.
This one is a good example, any Android without the blessing of Google and without Google Play would not sell. For the people, who were demanding MSFT to ditch WP and do an Android fork, this is the case and point. If any one could have pulled an Android Phone w/o Google Play it was Amazon and now we learn that they too are incapable of pulling some miracles.
The reason for giving Alpha status to Amazon is because they have a mildly successful android tablet and an android app store the preceded the phone by few years.
It has all the same mistakes that their tablet had. Its an android device that's not compatible with android apps. It provides less features than the devices its competing with and offers no reason to buy it over a regular android device.
I don't get how they're not seeing this aspect of it at all.
I'm sure there's someone out there who would give you a $0.99 laptop.
With camera and microphone always engaged and uploading everything you do to a central server so your tiniest behavioral characteristics can be sold to advertisers.
Running the numbers, I find the 32gig phone will cost $450 over 24 months, with $0 down. To my mind, a $433 (inc. tax/shipping) 32 gig Nexus 5 is a better value - a larger screen, better PPI resolution, standard upgradeable Android 4.4.4 with access to all the apps in the Google Play Store.
Plus, it's perfectly possible to buy stuff on Amazon using a standard smart phone.
The Fire Phone does have a better camera, but aside from that I see little reason to commit to the Amazon ecology and isolate oneself from the convenience and flexibility of standard Android.
The Facebook phone went from $99 to $0 on AT&T after a month or two, and it ultimately flopped. I suspect the Amazon phone is going to flop as well.
Looks pretty good. But battery is not replaceable, and no memory expansion? And their motto is "never settle"? I'm a bit disappointed. Might as well hold out and see what the Nexus 6 is going to look like (6" screen?). Perhaps there will be a $100 price drop on the Nexus 5 at that time....
The reviews on this phone are very bad- frequent freezes, slow UI, randomly calling people, extremely limited number of apps, and lacking in basic functionality. I can understand the $0.99 price tag.
Horrible initial pricing strategy with equally terrible subsidies. It's like they positioned this product from penthouse to outhouse in less than 90 days.
Amazon doesn't release sales figures for devices, but a writer at The Guardian tried to extrapolate sales figures based on traffic and ad impressions and estimated about 35,000 devices in use [1].
