You’ve got to wonder when Amazon will start paying you to take its Fire Phone off its hands. That would be the logical next step, considering the e-commerce giant has just consigned its first smartphone to the bargain bin.
A month and a half after it released, the company has discounted the price of the handset to 99 cents on contract. That’s a big discount—99.5%, to be exact—from the $199 price tag when Amazon announced the phone in June, just three months ago.
See also: Amazon Launches The Fire Phone, Glutted With Clever Bells And Whistles
So for any cheapskates who wouldn’t dream of paying whatever Apple plans to charge for its massive iPhones tomorrow, you can now snag a new device for less than the price of a cup of coffee. (About 43% less, it turns out.)
For that rock-bottom price, customers get a 32GB phone and a raft of unusual features. The Fire Phone offers Dynamic Perspective, a visual effect that shifts the screen image in a 3D-ish way, based on where you’re situated in front of it. It also comes with live customer support via a service called Mayday. And then there’s Firefly, the camera tool that can identify objects, text, movies, books and more in the real world, so you they can buy them (on Amazon, of course).
It’s not a bad deal, considering you still get unlimited cloud storage for photos and a free year of Amazon Prime, even at that low price. The down side is that, even though it’s an Android device, it runs an adapted version of the mobile software. In other words, you can’t run Google Play’s Android apps on it out of the box.
The fact that Amazon’s practically giving away its smartphone so soon after its release it doesn’t bode well for its mobile ambitions. And it’s not just here in the United States, where it works on domestic carrier AT&T. The device also opened for pre-orders in the U.K. on O2 and in Germany on Deutsche Telekom today at similar, barely there prices with a ship date of September 30.
Lead image by Adriana Lee for ReadWrite
