Under the Apple Hype Machine, Amazon Drops Fire Phone Price To 99 Cents

Whatever it is that Apple's going to announce a few hours from now, it seems Amazon has decided it's probably not going to send people rushing to buy its Fire phone. Amazon's cut the price of the phone from $199 to 99 cents. At that price, the Fire phone comes with free Amazon Prime membership, too -- but also a 2-year contract with (exclusive carrier) AT&T. Writes ExtremeTech: Whether that’s going to be enough to stimulate sales is an open question — $450 unlocked is still a tough sell for a device that is overmatched by products like the cheaper Nexus 5, or the recently unveiled $500 second-gen Moto X. In August, adoption data from advertising agency Chitika claimed that total Amazon Fire Phone sales were paltry, representing just 0.015-0.02% of phones in use, or fewer than 30,000 phones. That number will have doubtlessly ticked up slightly since then, and it’s true that Amazon’s partners, like AT&T, have aggressively pushed the phone in online stores.

Comments

What was Amazon thinking?

[sirwired]

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what Amazon was thinking when they released the thing. While on a "raw spec" basis, it's not a bad phone, it's headline feature does little more (at the moment) than make it easier to buy stuff from Amazon. Why would anybody buy this phone over a similarly-priced phone from Samsung/Moto/LG?

If the phone was significantly cheaper than the competition (like the Kindle Fire), or if the tight Amazon integration was a super-useful feature (like the Kindle Readers), it might have been a success. But charging the same as the competition for a phone running a custom OS? I expected it to be about as successful as the "Facebook Phone", which is to say "not at all".

This sort of completely blind hubris reminds me of the Netflix fiasco. Anybody with more than a few brain cells to rub together should have been able to see the flaws here...

It's not the Phone, it's the Carrier!

[RealGene]

Why should I pay them for what amounts to a Point-of-Sale terminal, then have to sign with and pay AT&T for the means to connect it?
AMZN already has "free" 3G via WhisperNet for Kindle; why can't they just act as a reseller for air/data time?
What I thought should happen when AMZN announced a phone was that you would buy it for a nominal amount, and your AMZN purchases would generate airtime credits:
Buy something, get a percentage of the purchase price converted to minutes/megabytes. Of course, you could always 'buy' more mins/megs, but if you're trying to drive consumption of your other products, it seems straightforward to make the means to do so a reward for the behavior you want.

Re:It's a Fire Sale

[Dogtanian]

Joking aside, the "99 cents" headline might give the impression of a big (if not "fire sale") reduction, but it's is as misleading (and pointless) on its own as the subsidised headline "price" of *any* contract-tied phone is.

This post already made the point that the total price of phone + contract (since you can't get the former without the latter) over two years is $600, which implies that it was $800 before when the still-contract-tied phone was selling for "$200" and it was being panned as an awful deal.

If it's not quite a non-story, it's not the one it's being made out to be either.