Amazon Stuck With $83m Worth of Fire Phones

If you’ve got a spare $83 million in your back pocket and not much to do with it, Amazon may just become your new best friend! We’ve recently become aware that the online retail giant Amazon has a cool $83 million worth of their Fire phones that aren’t moving through the consumer market. Alongside an announcement of a $544 million loss this quarter, with the Fire phone being largely to blame, Amazon’s original investment of $170 million into the Fire phone isn’t looking too hot.

Part of the blame is said to be with the branding of the technology. Amazon originally set out into the lower end of the consumer market with their competitively priced Kindle Fire tablet – coming in at only $99 on release. However, for the Fire they decided a different route. Firstly you can choose to get the phone through an AT&T contract for $200, or purchase it outright for $700. What’s the catch? No matter which avenue you travel down – you’re carrier-locked to AT&T.

There were problems selling on release, seeing AT&T move the phone down to $0.99 on-contract with no massive improvement in sell-through results. Looking into customer reviews on the Amazon official page you can see some of the disinterest and general ‘internet hate’ surrounding the Fire. Users have provided Amazon’s investment with a scornful 2-star rating with the majority of ratings being a 1-star blowout – amounting to 1,912 total.

All things considered, what has made this phone such a flop? The lack of Google. Although running Android OS, the Fire contains no Google support – meaning no Chrome, Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps or Google Music. Say anything you want about the ‘Google overlords’ or current popular ‘Illuminati’ culture. Life sucks without these applications on Android.

There’s a large possibility you’ll be finding the Fire in a ‘bargain bin’ fairly soon. Don’t get us wrong, coming in with a 5.5″ screen, 2.2GHz Quad-core Snapdragon CPU and 2GB of ram – this phone is no chump when it comes to technical specifications – there’s just quite a few other implications that didn’t allow for success.

I’ll certainly be looking to pick one up myself as a secondary phone if and when it hits clearance pricing.

We’ll leave you now with a painful user review, quite possibly written in the same context once upon a time to a lover of old – this novel is titled “I wanted to love you“.

Image courtesy of Amazon