Amazon Fire Phone US price fell by 70 percent in recent months

Amazon took 70 percent off the price of its Fire Phone smartphone in the United States within a few months. Where the device cost 649 dollars at the release in the summer, it is now 199 dollars.

In Amazon’s online store in Germany, the price also falls, but not so quickly: it became available at the beginning of October for 449 euros, but the Fire Phone now has a price of 399 euros. It seems to be a temporary offer, while the price reduction in Amazon’s home country seems permanent.

A drastic price drop usually indicates that a manufacturer wants to get rid of its unsold inventory, because storing and preserving the devices is more expensive than selling the devices for less than expected. That also seems to be the case now: disappointing sales weighed on the most recent financial results. Such a drastic price reduction is not unique: something like this happened before, for example, with HP, which took three quarters of the price of its Touchpad tablet in 2011.

Despite the limited success, Amazon has said it will continue to develop smartphones based on its own Fire OS, a fork of Android without Google services. The Fire Phone is characterized by a 3D interface that works with face tracking and the extensive integration with Amazon’s own services, such as Firefly, a camera function with which users can let the software recognize objects, after which they can order those objects directly in Amazon’s webshop.