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No surprise: Amazon officially discontinues the ill-fated Fire Phone

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In news which will surely be no surprise to anyone, Amazon is no longer selling the unloved Fire Phone. Head on over to the Amazon Fire Phone’s product page and you’ll notice the phone is “currently unavailable” in both the 32GB and 64GB storage flavors. Despite many attempts to get people to notice its first smartphone, it seems Amazon didn’t do enough to make it appealing. Amazon confirmed to GeekWire that “the company sold out of its inventory of Fire Phones in the U.S. and globally at the end of August.”

This news comes days after a story broke claiming Amazon was set to abandon its smartphone efforts and focus more on its successful ventures. With this confirmation and the disappearance of all Fire Phone stock from Amazon’s online store, it’s clear the company has finally exhausted its supply of smartphones, after only 14 months on the market and only selling a reported 13,000 phones total.

It doesn’t seem like that long ago, Amazon’s chief was onstage proudly showing off the company’s first real foray into the smartphone hardware market. With its supposedly innovative FireFly product scanning feature and glasses-free 3D Dynamic Display display of-sorts, the Fire Phone seemed like it could be a hit. But it never caught on, the features clearly didn’t resonate with real-world consumers like the Kindle e-book readers and Fire tablets do. Other specs were comparable to flagship phones, like its Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB RAM and LTE connectivity. But it failed to offer anything innovative or disruptive that consumers actually wanted or needed.

At the beginning, the Fire Phone cost $199 on contract with AT&T, on a 2-year plan, or $649 off contract. By the time the end was nigh, Amazon was selling the Fire Phone for $130 off contract, including a 1-year Prime subscription worth $99, effectively making the phone just $31. If this was any major smartphone manufacturer, it would be labelled a calamitous launch. In all honesty, you could probably say the same for Amazon. The product was supposed to herald Amazon’s triumphant entry in to the smartphone world. But it wasn’t to be. The Fire Phone is no more. Still, it lasted longer than the Kin 1 and HP Pre 3, so it’s not the worst-selling phone ever made.

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