Amazon’s interest in smartphones is one that has been rumored about for a long time, until a few months ago when the company took the wraps off the Fire Phone. The Fire Phone is Amazon’s take on the Android smartphone, and similar to the Kindle Fire tablets, it will run a forked version of Android and came with some pretty interesting features.
Amazon’s Fire Phone isn’t selling. The company said today “it would take a $170 million charge ‘primarily related to Fire phone inventory valuation and supplier commitment costs’,” Recode’s Jason Del Ray reports. The Fire Phone was worth a try, but ultimately not good enough. Amazon gave few reasons for anyone to buy its phone instead of Apple’s iPhone or any random Android device. The Fire Phone was mediocre—it has a two-star rating on Amazon—and there was nothing disruptive about how Amazon priced it.
