Everybody and their mother is writing about the Apple event yesterday. Watch this, Pay that, two new iPhones that are apparently too big for pockets now, blah blah. I'm not going to rehash the keynote, you've read it four other places already and I don't have anything new to add about a $349 gold-look wristwatch nobody outside Cupertino has actually touched yet.
What I keep thinking about instead is a much smaller story that got buried under all that noise this week: Amazon quietly dropped the Fire Phone to 99 cents on contract.
Ninety-nine cents. For a phone that launched six weeks ago at $199 on a two-year AT&T contract (or $649 unlocked, which almost nobody paid). That's not a promotion, that's a company admitting defeat in the loudest possible whisper, timed so it'd get lost under Apple headlines. Smart move, actually, if you're trying to bury bad news. Drop it the same week as the biggest Apple event in years and let it drown.
I was mildly curious about the Fire Phone when it came out in July. Not curious enough to buy one, but curious. The whole pitch was Dynamic Perspective, this head-tracking thing that tilts the UI as you move your face around, plus Firefly, the object-recognition camera feature that's supposed to let you scan a box of cereal and buy it instantly off Amazon. I played with a demo unit at a Best Buy in July for about ten minutes and came away thinking: this is a solution looking for a problem. Tilting my phone to see a sidebar isn't a feature I asked for. It's a party trick, and it's the kind of party trick that's neat for ninety seconds and then just kind of annoying, like a hologram sticker on a trading card.
The bigger issue nobody at Amazon seems to have wanted to say out loud is that the Fire Phone runs Fire OS, which is Android with the actual Google stuff ripped out and replaced with Amazon's own app store. No Gmail app, no real Google Maps, no Chrome. If you're already deep into Google's ecosystem (and in 2014, who isn't at least a little), that's a dealbreaker before you even get to the gimmicks. The Amazon Appstore has been playing catch-up with the Play Store for years and it shows the second you go looking for something specific and it's just not there.
The one thing on that phone I'd actually defend is Mayday, the button that connects you to a live support person on video in under fifteen seconds, 24/7. I've used it on my Kindle Fire tablet exactly once, at like 11pm on a Sunday, to figure out why a book wasn't syncing, and a real person popped up on screen almost instantly and fixed it while I watched. That's genuinely good customer service infrastructure. It's just attached to a phone where it's solving a smaller and smaller share of the actual problem, because the actual problem is nobody's buying the phone in the first place.
Ninety-nine cents six weeks after release is a rounding error away from "please, just take it." Retailers do steep discounts on slow movers all the time, sure, but the speed here is what's notable. This isn't a phone that limped along for a year and got quietly discounted before the next model. It's a company cutting the price 99.5% before most two-year contracts on comparable phones would even hit their first renewal window. I'd bet actual money we hear about writedowns on unsold inventory before the year's out.
None of this means Amazon's hardware ambitions are over, to be clear. The Kindle line sells fine, the Fire tablets are decent for the price, and Amazon has the balance sheet to eat a bad bet without blinking. But the Fire Phone specifically looks like a first-generation product that needed a second and third generation to find its footing, except Amazon may not get the chance to make those, because a phone nobody's buying doesn't get a sequel.
So while the rest of the internet argues about lugs and sapphire glass and whether 4.7 inches is now "the small one," I'm over here mildly fascinated by a phone that went from $199 to a penny short of a dollar in the time it takes a library book to come due. That's the story I'll remember from this week, honestly, more than the watch.