It’s not a Black Friday deal as much as it may be another attempt for Amazon to get rid of excess Fire Phone inventory, but for what it’s worth, the retail giant is now selling the unlocked version of the poor-selling device for only $199.
This is indeed quite ironic, as the Fire Phone once sold on AT&T at $199 on a two-year agreement, but since AT&T has long slashed the phone’s contract price to $0.01, it’s the unlocked edition’s turn to get its price reduced. Originally $449, the Fire Phone is now $250 cheaper at $199, and Amazon certainly hopes that this could get customers to take a flyer on the device, which many had panned as being overly expensive and gimmicky for a phone with midrange specs.
Last month, Amazon reported that it took a $170 million charge due to a huge backlog of unsold Fire Phones, taking up a good chunk of the company’s $437 million loss in the third quarter of 2014. Amazon also said that there were still about $83 million in unsold Fire Phones. But is it too little, too late for a device that had so much hype devoted to it ahead of its debut? Amazon hopes that its new price cuts could partly do the trick, finally giving consumers the “good reason” to buy the Fire Phone that one analyst said didn’t exist in the run-up to its release.