There are many factors when it comes to the success or downfall of a particular piece of hardware, and where smartphones are concerned, this extremely cut-throat business environment leaves very little room for error. In fact, it was not too long ago that the Amazon Fire Phone received a writedown of $170 million – which is not going to hurt the company’s bottomline too much, but it is still a massive bleeding of money no matter which angle you look at it from. The device did not manage to pick up high scores in reviews, not to mention garnering a fair amount of customer review scores that resided on the low end side of things, not to mention taking a massive critical hit, if you will, on its unsold stock in the recent quarterly report. Amazon’s reason behind the issues behind the Fire Phone? Its price, apparently.
Amazon’s senior vice president of devices, David Limp, mentioned to Fortune, “We didn’t get the price right. I think people come to expect a great value, and we sort of mismatched expectations. We thought we had it right. But we’re also willing to say, ‘we missed.’ And so we corrected.”
Do you think that this particular statement is accurate in nature? Perhaps, as the launch price of $200 was far too high for the masses, and it eventually fell down to just $0.99 on contract, but the pricing alone is not the only factor that contributed to the poor sales of the Fire Phone, since users themselves are not happy with what they ended up with, citing issues such as poor battery life, overheating handsets, a user interface to be forgotten, and the lack of apps, Google Apps especially.
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