For Amazon, this year's Black Friday is the best time of the year to clear its shelves of the $83 million worth of unsold Fire Phones.
The e-commerce company has yet again slashed the price off its flop of a smartphone to $199, a $250 price drop from its already discounted price of $449.
The deal, which Amazon announced on Nov. 25 and is expected to last through next week on Dec. 1, marks the first time Amazon will sell the GSM Fire Phone unlocked, according to Amazon senior public relations manager Michelle Taylerson.
While the phone was previously tied to AT&T, it is now also compatible with T-Mobile and a number of smaller GSM wireless carriers. However, the Fire Phone won't run on Verizon and Sprint.
Aside from the price cut, Taylerson also says that customers will receive additional perks from Amazon. That includes, of course, a free year of Amazon Prime membership that is normally worth $99. With Prime, customers get two-day free shipping for all purchases and Amazon's growing library of streaming videos and music.
The unlocked Fire Phone will also receive a few features that are more gimmicky than actually useful. For instance, Taylerson says Amazon's Firefly service will provide translation services for English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. It will also identify a bottle of wine that the user is considering buying. Also, the Fire Phone will have a Best Shot feature that will allow users to choose which among three shots of the same photo is the best.
This is not the first time Amazon offered deep discounts for the wildly unsuccessful Fire Phone. Shortly after the company launched its first smartphone with much fanfare by headlining its head-tracking abilities for a 3D screen effect, the Fire Phone headed straight to the sales bin with only a $0.99 price tag for the 32GB locked version with a two-year contract with AT&T. The 64GB version was priced at $99.
While the Fire Phone looked impressive on paper, Amazon failed to bring a truly new experience that would convince consumers to switch over from Apple's iPhones or from devices running on Android. The Fire Phone sports a decent 4.7-inch 720p resolution screen, a 13 MP back camera and a 2.2 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 SoC.
The phone, which many believed to be priced using the same aggressive model Amazon uses for its line of Kindle Fire tablets, was initially priced at $649 without a contract, effectively putting it in direct competition with more popular smartphones that were debuting at around the same time, including the new iPhones and the Samsung Galaxy Note 4. Without the same price advantage enjoyed by its tablets, the Fire Phone quickly sizzled out in the face of better offerings from other companies.
Amazon's third-quarter results show a $437 million loss, a huge chunk of which was attributed to the $170 million charge related to the write-down costs of the Fire Phone.
