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After catching the news that Amazon is sitting on millions of dollars worth of Fire Phones, it would seem they’re throwing a bone to their launch partner AT&T.
Starting today you can score a Kindle Fire HDX 7″ tablet for $49.99 with the purchase of an Amazon Fire Phone, which you can actually score for pretty cheap at the moment.
If you’re shopping an inexpensive two screen solution, and you’re a fan of Amazon services, you can catch more info on the AT&T Kindle Fire page.
I’m not sure what Amazon could have done to be honest. Even if they had been substantially more proactive, putting people on the ground, building a grass roots fan base, courting influencers and creating evangelists, instead of the top-down marketing and outreach they decided on, it still might not have meant success for their first phone outing.
Launching a new phone in this market is a near guaranteed failure. While Amazon has found quite a bit of success with their Kindle series, tablets are companion devices. Second screens. Phones are mission critical communication devices for most folks. That makes consumers far more conservative. We’re a lot less likely to take a risk with a phone. Continue reading “Amazon Writes Off $170 Million During Earnings Call Following Weak Fire Phone Sales”
The long rumored Amazon phone is official!
The Fire Phone builds off of Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem, delivering a similar “FireOS” user interface running on top of a custom build of Android. This means 3rd party Android apps will be compatible, but Google services wont be included as this will use the Amazon App store instead of Google Play.
The hardware is a mix of mid-range and high-end. I’m glad to see the slightly smaller 4.7″ screen, though it’ll come in at 720p instead of the terrific 1080p found on the HTC M7. The venerable Qualcomm 800 quad-core is on board backed up by 2GB of RAM, plenty powerful for gaming on this screen resolution. Storage comes in 32GB and 64GB flavors, with no MicroSD card expansion it seems like a good platform to push Amazon Cloud Storage, as you can upload photos taken from a Fire Phone for free. Continue reading “Amazon Fire Phone Coming Exclusively to AT&T – 32GB for $199 on Contract”