Amazon has a gigantic footprint. When it comes to buying things online, there are a plethora of options, but Amazon is one of, if not the company anyone thinks about. Amazon has just about everything you could want with just the click of a button, and so creating devices that make it easier to get that stuff just makes sense for the company. Even before Amazon ever launched a tablet, and long before it introduced a smartphone, everyone knew it was coming. It just had to happen.
Amazon’s impact on so many different industries has been paramount to the way that it handles all sorts of different things. Books, music, cloud storage, and whatever else you can think of, Amazon probably has a foot in there somewhere. Utilizing devices to let its customers access it, download it and, specifically, buy it just feels like the right thing to do. And, let’s face it, there are people that are wholly invested within the Amazon ecosystem that having a tablet, or smartphone, that accesses all of that content easily (or more directly at least) seems logical.
Simply put, Amazon hit all of the right notes when it came to its tablets and Kindle eReaders. Put better, Amazon’s gotten so much better at pricing its hardware accordingly, while not really sacrificing the specifications that people want. The Kindle-branded tablets have become quite the desired product, especially because of their price tags. They aren’t the best tablets on the market, but they’re certainly not the worst. And the prices make them even more attractive.
The same can’t be said for the Fire Phone.
This is a device that’s just not getting the fair treatment from Amazon at all, and it doesn’t make any sense. A smartphone, a device that works to basically function as a constant bridge between Amazon and the end user, makes even more sense than a tablet. Well, depending on the person’s daily routine, maybe, but for those who use their smartphone for just about everything, essentially shrinking that experience from a tablet to a phone is — or was — the right thing to do.
People were genuinely excited for the Fire Phone, too for all the reasons I described above and more. But then it all shattered the very moment Amazon unveiled the pricing for the handset. Every single person I knew that was excited for the phone immediately checked out of it. It broke the tradition of Amazon’s “cheap” hardware working as a gateway to just about everything else Amazon sold. Yes, the Fire Phone has decent specifications, but for the price of the device there are better options from other manufacturers.
And all of those devices can access Amazon services, too.
At this point, the fact that Amazon just keeps offering up the Fire Phone at random times a year with a significant price drop is just rubbing salt in the wound. I’m sure that Amazon sells a few units every single time they have one of these (fire?) sales, but if Amazon would just keep the thing priced under $200, they’d have a better shot at keeping people interested, I think. Maybe someone wasn’t able to make the $189 deal you had going today, Amazon, and by the time you run another deal maybe they stop caring.
Just drop the price of the phone already. Stop doing this back-and-forth with the pricing. It’s banana pants. Do what you should have done in the first place and keep the price low. I’d suggest also going easy on the proprietary software, too, but that’s probably asking too much.
Did you buy a Fire Phone?