It had better be. The Fire phone is available exclusively from AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) at $200 for the 32-Gbyte version and $300 for the 64-Gbyte version with a 2-year contract. The phones sell for $650 and $750 unlocked on the company’s Next 18 plan.
The premium price is presumably offset by a one year free subscription to Amazon Prime, the company’s $99 per year two shipping, streaming video, and streaming music service. Existing Prime customers get a free 12-month extension to their existing contract.
The Fire phone includes free unlimited storage for photos on Amazon’s cloud service and free access to its recently announced Mayday customer support service. Bezos also showed off a new service called “Firefly” that recognizes objects, songs, TV shows, and art. If, for example, a user takes a picture of a product, that product can be added to the Amazon shopping cart with a press on the dedicated Firefly button. Amazon’s app for the iPhone offers a similar service without the button.
The new phone also includes something Amazon calls “dynamic perspective” which offers a 3D-like effect that makes the image on the screen appear to move when users move their heads. This is not true 3D, but something akin to the motion parallax feature that Apple included with iOS 7 and which caused some users to complain about its nausea-inducing effects and forced Apple to give users a toggle to turn motion parallax off. Bezos apparently demonstrated some actual uses for this technology at the event.
The Fire offers 16 Gbytes more memory than either the iPhone or Samsung’s Galaxy S V, but Amazon has basically chickened-out. In order really to have a chance to grab a significant piece of the market Amazon needed a phone that cost around $100. The company decided it couldn’t afford to take that kind of loss. As it is, the Fire is unlikely to help or hurt Amazon’s top or bottom line.
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