Bezos: Why it won't matter if Fire Phone flops

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Price drop again. 32GB unlocked phone is now $229.

Mhh maybe they seen it as success from last sale and turn all at&t phones into unlocked ones.

[leebase]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Price drop again. 32GB unlocked phone is now $229.

Clearing out the warehouses

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Then unlock the phone and lower the price. Have you not learned anything from the current $199 sale? High prices and AT&T exclusivity killed the phone.

That seems to be the consensus:

http://www.cnet.com/news/why-amazon-...he-fire-phone/

Despite the dismal results, Bezos is not giving up on his company's first attempt at a smartphone. The company will continue to support the phone and is likely working on a second model. Some technologies "take iterations" to get right, Bezos said at a Business Insider conference in December.

"With the phone I just ask you to stay tuned," he said.

This approach speaks to the CEO's stubbornness when it comes to making big bets. Bezos is not afraid of investing heavily -- or failing. The Fire Phone, although currently a black eye for company, is part of Bezos' plan to make Amazon an even bigger part of consumers' lives. The company has more than 260 million active accounts. Analysts estimate that roughly 25 million of those are Prime subscriptions, Amazon's membership service that includes free, two-day shipping, as well as e-books and streaming video and music.

Bezos wants to further tie Prime members to his site and is trying to use hardware to do so. In the last year, Amazon has extended its line of hardware from e-readers and tablets to a TV set-top box, game controller, a barcode scanner for grocery shopping at home and, of course, the smartphone. Amazon has even diversified its Kindle e-book reader, arguably its most successful hardware gambit, and added a high-end model.

And the expectation is that the next one will be cheaper and not tied to ATT.

If Amazon is going to make another phone, it will have to fix two big problems: price and exclusivity. Many people had expected Amazon to deliver a low-cost phone, given Bezos' willingness to lose money on devices in hopes of making money off content. The Fire tablet was an example of this strategy. But the Fire Phone's price tag (although it included more memory than other phones) was right in line with Apple's and Samsung's high-end devices.

"There's only one high-end smartphone left," Gillis said, indicating Apple's iPhone line. "Even Samsung's getting crushed."

Google's previous strategy of selling its Nexus smartphones at a lower, off-contract price yielded a lot of buzz and sales. Amazon followed that play with its Fire tablet and could revive it for the second Fire Phone.

The other issue Amazon will need to address is the phone's limited availability. The company had an exclusive deal with AT&T, which many said stunted sales.