Crash and Burn of Amazon's Fire Phone

The Amazon Fire phone is a prime example of a company having good intentions but a ultimately a bad idea. Amazon released the Fire smart phone on July, 25 2014 it was priced at $199 and was poised to compete with Apple and Samsung smartphones. The specifications of the phone were up to par with the market. The Fire phone sports a 4.7 inch display with a resolution of 720 pixels by 1080 pixels, this screen size puts it on par with both the galaxy and iPhone smartphones. In addition to the rest of its specifications were competitive with the market. The phone packs a 2.2 gigahertz processor with four cores just like its competitors. The camera packed an impressive 13 megapixels which put it ahead of the iPhone and on par with the galaxy. It came with two gigabytes of RAM and came in either 32 gigabytes or 64 gigabytes storage configurations.

On paper the Fire phone was a legitimate competitor unfortunately the drawing board is often far different than reality. While the phones specifications were good its apps were not. This was the first and primary issue that users of the fire phone faced. Even the phone used android software it did not use the google app store known as google play. Instead it used Amazon’s propriety app store called Amazon apps. Google did not allow cross platforming between the play store and amazon apps, this meant that Fire phone users had very limited access to apps when the phone was first released. Although developers later stepped in and made more apps for the Amazon store, the damage was already done. Negative reviews regarding app accessibility hurt the Fire’s sales right out of the gate.

On top of all of this Amazon was entering an already highly saturated market. There were already a large number of smart phones and smart phone producers in the market and competition was fierce. In order for a new smart phone to stand out in the market it needs something that the competition doesn’t have. Unfortunately for the Fire phone it had what the competition had already, in other words it wasn’t it wasn’t anything special. The Fire phone lacked a definitive “it factor” that would distinguish it from the competition, it lacked any competitive advantage. In order to offset this problem Amazon attempted to undercut competitors pricing by setting the phones price at $199. Unfortunately for Amazon this tactic didn’t work and now the Fire phones are stacked up in warehouses around the country waiting to be recycled.