Do you know anyone who owns an Amazon Fire Phone? Yeah, me neither. If I was talking about an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy product, then such a statement would probably be strange, but according to a study released by the Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP), hardly anyone actually owns a Fire Phone.
CIRP conducted a study of 500 random Amazon.com customers in the third quarter and asked them if they owned a Fire phone in order to see what sort of proliferation the device had. As it turns out, zero of them said they had one, whereas a quarter said they had either a Kindle Fire tablet, a Kindle Reader or both and 5% said they owned the new Amazon Fire TV. Fierce Wireless says that Amazon only has sold ‘a few thousand’ of the phones.
Personally, I can’t say that I’m very surprised by this number. The Fire Phone originally was listed for $200 and in this mid-range saturated smartphone market, the phone had virtually no features that made it stand out. The features were either glitchy or pointless, and the primary selling point (Firefly, which made purchasing things via Amazon faster) made the phone seem like a gimmick and a marketing tool first. Consumers might be a little thick, but the phone just didn’t have enough going for it. Released in July, the phone was dropped to $0.99 with an AT&T contract in September.
Maybe Amazon should have taken notes from the Facebook Phone flop last year.]]>
Posted in Prepaid Phones