The smartphone market is a tough one to enter and Amazon is showing just how tough. The company just slashed the price of its Fire Phone to 99 cents ahead of Apple's iPhone 6 event.
When Apple unveiled the original iPhone at MacWorld 2007, Steve Jobs was at the top of his game. The former CEO conducted a well-staged and rehearsed presentation to introduce Apple's entry into the smartphone world. Up until then, the biggest smartphone players were BlackBerry, Nokia and Palm.
During Jobs' iPhone introduction he highlighted that the smartphone market was still in its infancy and said that Apple was going to try and grab 1 percent market share (10 million units) in 2008, the first full year the iPhone would be on the market.
Apple met its goal and has since become one of the most successful smartphone makers in the world, alongside Samsung. The two companies have made it difficult for all others and Amazon is the latest victim.
Amazon, though, is fighting back before Apple's Sept. 9 iPhone extravaganza with its announcement that it is slashing the price of the Fire Phone from $199.99 to 99 cents on its individual and family plans when buyers sign a new 2-year contract.
Amazon began selling its first smartphone, the Android-based Fire Phone, on July 25. The handset is exclusive to AT&T and was priced at $199 when signing a new 2-year contract, or $649 with no contract. The smartphone hasn't fared well in reviews and many saw the device as a handheld gateway created to push Amazon's online store and its services. Amazon even includes a full year of Amazon Prime content and services, which keeps users tied into the company's ecosystem.
The Amazon Fire Phone features a 4.7-inch 1280 x 720 HD LCD display with a pixel density of 315 pixels per inch (ppi). It's powered by a 2.2-GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, Adreno 320 GPU (graphics processing unit), and has 2 GB of RAM.
The Fire Phone's camera capabilities include a 13-megapixel rear camera with OIS (optical image stabilization), multiframe HDR, LED flash, and a 2.1-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat and selfies. The handset ships with 32 GB of internal storage and free cloud storage for all Amazon content and photos taken with the device. It's packing a 2,400 mAh battery that will provide up to 22 hours of talk time and up to 285 hours of standby time.
If you were interested in the Amazon Fire Phone but felt it was overpriced at $199, you can now score it for less than a dollar with 2-year contract.
