Amazon cuts Fire Phone price to as low as 99 cents with AT&T contract
Amazon made a name for itself by selling products dirt-cheap, even if it came at a loss. Now comes one of the online retailer’s craziest-sounding offers.
Amazon chopped about $200 off the prices of its first smartphone on Monday, making a 32-gigabyte version cheap enough to sell at a dollar store: 99 cents with a two-year service contract.
Price cuts are common before the release of new versions of smartphones, but Amazon released the Fire Phone less than seven weeks ago. The move signals that the device probably isn’t selling well and that Amazon wants to steal some thunder before Apple’s expected unveiling of a new iPhone Tuesday.
Exclusively available on AT&T, the Fire Phone comes with 12 months of free access to Amazon’s Prime subscription program for shipping discounts and a library of TV shows, movies and music. The phone has solid hardware.
But unique features, like a 4.7-inch screen intended to generate holographic displays, were criticized for not always working or being useful. Others said the phone tried too hard to peddle products from Amazon. Amazon hasn’t released sales figures for the phone.
With a new iPhone expected to go on sale sometime this month, Amazon could be hoping to convince some smartphone purchasers turned off by the iPhone’s expected high price tag that the Fire Phone is a bargain too good to pass up. The 64-gigabyte version will now sell for $99 with a two-year contract. Without an AT&T service plan, the smaller version will now cost $449 and the larger version, $549.
The maker of Kindle e-readers and tablets deepened its push into hardware this year with the Fire Phone and the Fire TV streaming device. Amazon wants to get more people to try out Prime, especially the media offerings. The hardware push has included having technical support agents available by video chat around the clock.
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