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

It's a Fire Sale

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone had to say it.

Re:It's a Fire Sale

[RadioElectric]

Tobias: Oh, my God, we’re having a fire. Sale. Oh, the burning! It burns me! Evacuate all the schoolchildren! (Screaming. Singing “Amazing Grace.”) This isn’t a fever! (Continues singing.) Can’t even see where the knob is! (Dramatic sigh.) And scene.

Roger Danish: Um... would you like to try that a little simpler... maybe?

Tobias: No.

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.

It's not apple this time!

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

They failed on their own merits.

I doubt the Bigass iPhone thing today's the reason why they tipped on this.

Re:It's not apple this time!

[tepples]

Is there really any compelling feature of the Fire Phone other than being the only not-iPhone that plays Amazon streaming video?

Re:It's not apple this time!

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

It doesn't have that going for it anymore.

The UI's interesting as an experiment, but ultimately really creepy.

I'm pretty sure Aldous Huxley has a few things to say about an electronic gizmo that serves as an entry way to cheap consumer goods.

Re:It's not apple this time!

[ShaunC]

Well it's easy enough for pretentious 9 year olds to use for playing Minecraft, at least that's all I got out of the commercial. Pretty sure the blame for this phone's flop lies squarely at the feet of Amazon's marketing department or whoever they hired to produce the TV ad. The phone itself barely makes an appearance in the commercial, it's just a couple of kids yammering about how they're going to stream stuff and play games, followed by a double plug for Amazon Prime, which I'm still scratching my head over. I don't need to buy a new phone to get Amazon Prime.

Is Amazon trying to sell an actual product here, or just selling the idea of a digital babysitter? Either way I guess I'm not their target audience and I sorta wonder who is.

Re:It's not apple this time!

[ArcadeMan]

The difference between Apple and Amazon is that Apple understands there's a market outside of the USA.

Re:It's not apple this time!

[L4m3rthanyou]

I think they hired Microsoft's marketing department to do the commercial.

It's not even believable anyway. My irritating hipster children only use Apple products!

Spoon

[Naatach]

There's only so much you can get for a spoon that only works in the Amazon bowl.

Re:Spoon

[Richard_at_work]

I disagree with you on the walled garden argument - I can read Amazon Kindle books on the Kindle ecosystem series of devices, Apple devices, Android devices, Windows 8 devices, Windows Phone devices, Macs, Windows PCs, Linux PCs, Blackberrys and others.

I can read Apple iBooks on ... Apple devices and Macs.

I can view Amazon Instant Video content on various Kindles, Apple devices, Android devices, Windows 8 devices, all the major consoles, tonnes of TVs natively, and of course Windows PCs and Macs.

I can view Apple iTunes video content on ... Apple devices and Macs.

My content purchased from Amazon certainly seems to be available on a much wider range of devices than content purchased from Apple...

Fire = Zune

[globaljustin]

Amazon is a victim of their own hubris, not Apple.

Only an idiot or egomaniac would think that Amazon could compete with that product...that phone...it had too many dumb bells and whistles (3D screen! ooh shiny!) but all the important details were wrong.

Amazon lost out to a better designed, better marketed, more established, funner to use product...just like M$ did with Zune

Re:Fire = Zune

[UnknowingFool]

I think both the Amazon and Zune are examples of good but not good enough. The Zune wasn't a bad MP3 player. It could have been better if all the squirting worked like consumers wanted. But both entered a market way too late. Apple had moved on to the iPhone and the iPod Touch and left the Zune in the dust. The Fire has to compete with Android and Apple.

Re:So they cut it from $199 to $600. I see.

[Seumas]

For a buck, I'd buy it. Hell, I'd buy it for $20 or $30, even though it's within the confines of Amazon. It's not like the entire phone is going to be locked down to just Amazon. You'd surely still have a browser and apps to do various things outside of Amazon. And probably wifi service if you wanted to connect it to your home network or something.

It's the phone contract that does it in for me. In an age where I can use Ting as my phone service for an average of $12/mo with no contract, why in the hell would I want to get a two year expensive contract with one of the old phone companies?!

Re:So they cut it from $199 to $600. I see.

[gstoddart]

For a buck, I'd buy it. Hell, I'd buy it for $20 or $30, even though it's within the confines of Amazon. It's not like the entire phone is going to be locked down to just Amazon. You'd surely still have a browser and apps to do various things outside of Amazon. And probably wifi service if you wanted to connect it to your home network or something.

Of course, as a cynical, tin-foil hat wearing individual I'll say that anything you do can and will be monitored and tracked by Amazon for their own purposes, even when not directly using their products.

So, really, are you actually any better off?

Amazon's phone versus Amazon's tablet

[93 Escort Wagon]

The Kindle Fire was a well-marketed, cheap tablet launched at a time most people were just starting to hear how fun and useful tablets could be. Many people wanted a tablet, but were unwilling to drop $500 on an iPad - those folks bought a Kindle Fire. (Yeah there were other cheap tablets, but frankly the average Joe didn't ever hear about them)

The Fire Phone comes at a time when iOS and Android phones are already entrenched. The majority of people who want a smartphone already own one. Worse, there's not an obvious price gap between the Fire and it's erstwhile competition. Free Prime shipping isn't going to sell the phone, since the types of people who know about Prime are the type of people that already bought into a phone platform years ago.

"Under the Apple Hype Machine"?

[wonkey_monkey]

Under the Apple Hype Machine

Perhaps I'm being super-dense, but... what's that supposed to even mean?

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...

No Google Play Store

[sirwired]

Yes, you can still install and run Android apps like any other Android phone, as long as those apps are actually available from the Amazon app store. Not all apps have been customized or tested to run on Amazon's particular Android build, which is a little more custom than the "skin" other Android builders commonly use.

No, it's not as bad as a Zune, but it doesn't offer any compelling case over the more-standard alternatives.

Why buy Amazon hardware?

[sjbe]

I disagree with you on the walled garden argument - I can read Amazon Kindle books on the Kindle ecosystem series of devices

You've got it backwards. The question is why we would need a crippled Amazon device? I can buy an iPad and buy music and books and merchandise from Amazon. I cannot buy a Kindle and buy music from Apple. So I have less restrictions buying the Apple hardware than the Amazon hardware because Amazon software and content will run on more platforms.

Amazon's Fire tablets and phones are nothing special and are clearly aimed at getting you to buy more stuff from Amazon rather than for being a general use device. I don't really need Amazon's help there so what is the point of these devices? Even their e-paper based Kindles are pretty locked down (my wife has one) and it's relatively awkward to do anything other than buy stuff from Amazon with it.

My content purchased from Amazon certainly seems to be available on a much wider range of devices than content purchased from Apple...

Apple is trying to sell you a device. Amazon is trying to sell you content and stuff from their store. I'd rather have the Apple device and be able to buy from Amazon than they Amazon device and be unable to buy from Apple.

Re:Why buy Amazon hardware?

[CrashNBrn]

Even Steam is more open than Apple/iTunes. You can access nearly all Steam features from a normal browser. In fact with "Enhanced Steam" for Firefox, it's a better "experience" than browsing Steam via Steam.

I could hardly believe that I couldn't even browse the iTunes store without installing iTunes. Yeah I don't fucking think so. Just like the Windows 8 "store" --- not accessible from a browser that you know has bookmarks, and tabs and doesn't feel like a stupid-ass "app".

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.