Amazon Stops Selling Fire Phone

An anonymous reader writes: Last June Amazon announced their Fire Phone, an Android device packed with interesting but questionably useful tech that left reviewers unimpressed. Now, just a few weeks after big layoffs in Amazon's Fire Phone division, the phone has gone out of stock globally and seems unlikely to return. GeekWire says it's "an indication that they've finally exhausted their supply and they don't have plans to manufacture anymore."

Comments

Sucks too.

[Anonymous Coward]

The phones would have been dead easy to salvage. The Hardware inside them was great for the price.

All they would need to do would be to update them and actually reflash a stock android OS on them and then have apps that gave them access to the Amazon feature while still giving people all the features of any other android phone, including google play. It would have sold great.

But no one wants to be locked into just amazon (barring those of us who know how to side load), especially if they are trying to upgrade from a previous phone when they can't import their old google purchases and such and have a reduced or delayed release of software and updates due to it.

If they had just reflashed the Amazon Fire to an actual Android OS and then give us extensions to all the Amazon stuff through Apps that couldn't be uninstalled like most other phones have. They would have sold like crazy at the price point they were charging and higher than that.

No one likes Vendor lock-in like that when it can be avoided. It would be like if Samsung tried to make their own modified Android phone that could only get software from a samsung website, none would buy it, even with how popular Samsung is in that market.

Ubuntu

[transfire]

I half expect Amazon to acquire Canonical and run Unbuntu.

Re:Ama Amhole

[TheGratefulNet]

I was in the process of a multi-month (sigh) email dialog with an amazon (labs) recruiter; before the big article, things were coming along and there was interest from him (and his group) in me. after the layoff/reorg/article, a few weeks went by and nothing.

then, an email saying that they are 'regrouping' and would I like to apply for an android oriented job instead of the hw/fw job that I was more interested in. I gave him a good earfull about how amazon has no business (literally and figuratively) being in the android space, no one buys it, its a failure and fwiw, I have no background or interest in the race-to-the-bottom known as 'apps development' or even the o/s itself. hardware, sure, I'd be into it, but the android stuff at amazon is just a non-starter and everyone knows it.

of course, once I leveled with him, I don't expect to ever hear back from him again. in fact, he may even be RIF'd for all I know.

but I do know that amazon has to exit the android biz and spend its money elsewhere. they have a lot of power in the brand name (amazon) but android is just not the place for them, imho.

(I was actually pushing some new hardware ideas on a totally non-phone CES concept; and initially the recruiter was excited about it; but now I'm not hearing from him at all. I guess amazon really has fundamental problems that are more than just skin deep...)

Hardly surprising

[DrXym]

The Fire Phone had a pretty silly gimmick that needed four(!) additional cameras on the front face to track eyes in order to give the UI a pseudo 3D effect. So the device had 6 cameras in total. 5 on the face and one on the other side. If that doesn't ring alarm bells about a project that's gone off the rails then I don't know what does.

Aside from that it had a mediocre phone stack, ran a proprietary fork of Android (that wasn't compatible with the ecosystem) and it was tied to Amazon services.

Basically it was just a bad phone.