So I was at the AT&T store on Ponce a couple weeks back, mostly killing time while my phone got a new SIM, and the guy behind the counter was demoing the Fire Phone to absolutely nobody. Just standing there tilting it back and forth to show off the head-tracking thing. I watched for a minute out of morbid curiosity and then left without saying anything, which in retrospect feels a little sad.
Amazon dropped the price to 99 cents on contract last week (August 13th if you're keeping score), down from the original $199 it launched at back in July. Same phone, same two-year AT&T contract, same "free" year of Amazon Prime thrown in, just a dollar less than a candy bar now. If you want it without a contract it's still $449 for the 32GB model, which nobody is doing, because why would you.
I want to be clear, I don't think the Fire Phone is a bad piece of hardware exactly. The screen's fine. It's snappy enough. But the whole thing was built around two gimmicks - Dynamic Perspective, the head-tracking 3D effect thing, and Firefly, the object-recognition scanner that mostly exists so you can point your phone at a box of cereal and buy it from Amazon in four taps. Neither of those is a reason to buy a phone in 2014. They're neat for about ninety seconds and then you go back to using it like every other phone, except this one only runs Amazon's app store, which is missing basically everything you actually want. No real Google Maps. No Chrome. Spotty coverage on half the apps I use daily.
And it's AT&T exclusive, which already cuts your potential buyer pool in half before anyone's said a word about specs. I never understood that call. Exclusivity deals worked for Apple with the original iPhone because there wasn't another game in town yet. In 2014, with Verizon and Sprint and T-Mobile all fighting over subscribers, locking your weird experimental phone to one carrier just feels like leaving money on the table for no reason.
The thing that gets me about the price cut isn't the price cut itself, it's the timing. This phone launched with the Bezos keynote and the whole rollout back in June, shipped in late July, and by the second week of August they're basically giving it away. That's not a slow adjustment, that's a company looking at sell-through numbers and panicking a little. I've seen estimates floating around suggesting they'd sold something like 35,000 units in the first three weeks, against a phone that apparently took four years and a small fortune to develop. I don't know if that figure is exactly right, nobody outside Amazon does, but directionally it doesn't look great.
Compare that to what $199 buys you elsewhere right now: an iPhone 5s on contract, or a Galaxy S5, both established phones with real app ecosystems behind them, neither of which requires you to scan your cereal box to feel like the phone is doing something useful. The Fire Phone was never really competing on hardware. It was competing on "what if shopping was even more frictionless," and it turns out most people don't actually want their phone optimized primarily for buying stuff faster. Wild concept, I know.
I will say the free year of Prime bundled in is legitimately not nothing. If you were going to sign up for Prime anyway, that's close to a hundred bucks of value tacked onto a phone that now costs less than a pack of gum. So there's an argument that at 99 cents this thing becomes a weirdly decent Prime membership with a phone attached as a bonus, rather than a phone with Prime as a bonus. Strange way for a flagship product to end up being good value, but here we are.
I'm not buying one. My contract's not up till next spring, and even if it were, "buy stuff faster" just isn't a compelling enough pitch for me to give up my Nexus for a phone locked to one carrier's app selection. But I'll be curious what Amazon does next, because a company sitting on that much cash doesn't usually let its first real swing at phone hardware just quietly die in a stockroom somewhere.