Amazon finally gives up and stops selling the Fire Phone

 Amazon had been rumored to be working on a smartphone for years before the Fire Phone was unveiled. Just over a year ago we got our first look at the device, and it was weird. All the predictions about Amazon’s phone being inexpensive were wrong — the high price tag and gimmicky features kept consumers away and the Fire Phone flopped. Hard. Now even Amazon has admitted defeat by ending sales of the device.


You have to dig to even find the listings for the Amazon Fire Phone now as most links to the phone in Amazon’s Fire device pages have been removed. When you do find them, both the AT&T and unlocked Fire Phone show up as unavailable and no more stock is expected. This isn’t just a question of running out — we know Amazon has a mountain of unsold Fire Phones. They just aren’t being offered for sale on Amazon’s website anymore.

Like Amazon’s other Fire devices, the Fire Phone ran a heavily customized version of Android without Google’s services. Amazon supplied the apps, music, video, and everything else. This was the Fire Phone’s greatest weakness as Amazon’s services lacked many of the features that make Android phones great. Fire OS is fine for a content consumption device like a tablet, but not a phone. For example, the Fire OS email application is light years behind Gmail, and nothing available in the Appstore really fixes that shortcoming. The Fire Phone had a feature called “Dynamic Perspective” that used head tracking to adjust the UI, but it didn’t really make up for the missing features.

The Fire Phone had already seen huge price drops before being discontinued. It launched at more than $600 off-contract or $200 with an AT&T contract. The unlocked device has since been on sale for as little as $130, and that included a year of Amazon Prime (worth $99). Any remaining stock has probably been unloaded on resellers who will offer the devices on eBay and other deal-oriented sites. Basically, Amazon is washing its hands of this whole Fire Phone thing.
This move comes just a few weeks after reports surfaced that Amazon slashed its hardware design division (Lab126), which was responsible for the Fire Phone. The company is apparently not too keen on continuing in the phone market after losing millions on the Fire Phone. Other hardware projects like a larger Fire tablet and smart stylus were also canned when the hardware unit was downsized. It would be difficult for Amazon to ever make another smartphone with the specter of the Fire Phone hanging over its head. And so this device joins the likes of the HTC First, Microsoft Kin, and Palm Pre in the pantheon of failed smartphones.