The Amazon Fire Phone was launched in the U.S. last June to some hype, but the device had flopped miserably. So much so that Amazon USA has slashed the price of the 32GB smartphone to $189US (58% off), even cheaper than its previous Black Friday sale by $10.
This unlocked smartphone running Android has some pretty good hardware for the price, plus it comes with one year of Amazon Prime ($99 US). For those Canadians close to the U.S. border that have access to mailbox services to receive parcels, this phone might be screaming your name.
Fast Company sums up what went wrong with the Fire Phone, when Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was asked by Business Insider about the smartphone:
Introduced with grand ambitions last summer, the Fire Phone is widely seen as a fiasco. Originally priced at $199 (with contract) and intended as an iPhone competitor, it now sells for 99 cents, and Amazon has taken a $170 million write-down largely attributable to unsold Fire Phone inventory. Yet Bezos finally answers the question with the kind of reasoning that investors, customers, and pundits have come to expect from him: Amazon is going to pour more resources into its phone. Defending the Fire Phone as a “bold bet,” Bezos argues that it’s “going to take many iterations” and “some number of years” to get it right.
