
“The Fire was searching for a feature and just found it: a low price,” he said.Ĭhitika Insights, an analytics firm, analyzed hundreds of millions of web page views from United States and Canadian smartphone users to compare the first month of the Fire phone with the April debut of the Samsung Galaxy S5 from AT&T.Īfter 20 days, Amazon Fire phone users generated close to 0.02 percent of North American smartphone Web traffic, Chitika said, and then stalled.

But the price cut and an aggressive ad campaign will make a difference. “We had modest expectations, and the phone seems to be shy of those,” said Gene Munster, a senior analyst at Piper Jaffray. At a smaller store, two salesmen said they had sold exactly one Fire. “We got special shirts, staffed up for the launch - and then nothing,” said one salesman, who estimated his store had sold a total of 10 Fire phones. An AT&T spokesman also declined to comment on sales.īut at three Bay Area AT&T stores over the weekend, salesmen said that the Fire had performed dismally.

But the Fire was nevertheless unlikely to get anywhere near its forecast in its initial incarnation.Īmazon does not release sales numbers for its devices and declined to comment for this article. Apple, which is releasing its new iPhones on Tuesday, surpasses that every week. That is not much in the smartphone universe. Analysts initially expected sales of one million to two million units in the first year. Thousands of employees worked on it for four years. The Fire, released in late July, is an expensive venture for Amazon.
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Buyers of the phone still get a year of free Prime, Amazon’s shipping and video club, which normally costs $99. The price cut gets the Fire phone closer to the company’s classic model of giving away hardware in the expectation that users will order enough from Amazon to make it worthwhile. He noted that the so-called Facebook phone quickly dropped to 99 cents last year but never gained a foothold in the market. “If history is any indication, this doesn’t usually work,” said Wayne Lam, a senior analyst with IHS Technology.
