Last year, Amazon endlessly teased us all with what was going to be either a new smartphone or some kind of exotic sex toy. Unfortunately for Amazon, it was the former, and the Fire Phone failed to catch on. That’s okay, though, because the last phones have been sold, and the engineers who made the device into a real-life phone are gone. Amazon can just pretend that none of this ever happened.
It turns out that an AT&T-exclusive device that’s Android-based but doesn’t give you access to the full Google Play store isn’t of much interest to phone consumers, and it only took Amazon about six weeks to start selling the phones for 99 cents with a 2-year AT&T contract, which included a $100 Amazon Prime subscription as part of the package.
Maybe now that carriers have us paying for our phones, and not including them as a free thing that we get when signing a new two-year contract, consumers will be choosier about what smartphones when we see the actual sticker price, and it’s far higher than $200.
“[I]t appeared clear that above all else the Fire Phone was designed as a tool to make it more convenient for people to buy things from Amazon and consume Amazon content,” Ars Technica observed in its obituary for the phone, and Amazon will be trying something similar to that in the future with cheaper versions of their Fire tablets. We want more out of our phones than that, especially when signing a 2-year contract for the privilege.
Amazon finally stops selling the Fire Phone, as company adjusts its hardware strategy [Geekwire]
Amazon’s Fire Phone appears to be dead [Ars Technica]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
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