It
was looking as though it would not happen but earlier this week
Amazon finally sold the last of their Fire smartphones. When the
smartphones first came out, in June of 2014, it quickly became a top
seller for the Seattle-based company It was not long thou before the
sales started to dry up and Amazon slashed the price. After that it
was looking as though Amazon would be stuck with a warehouse full of
the smartphones.
"We
don’t plan to replenish stock at this time," said Kinley
Pearsall, a spokeswoman for Seattle-based Amazon. "We will
continue to support our Fire phone customers."
From
this statement from Amazon and a similar one by AT&T, along with
an article by the
Wall Street Journal, the possibility of a new version of the
smartphone is looking rather bleak. According to the article the
Seattle-based company laid of several engineers at their Lab126,
where the Fire phone was developed. Along with the layoffs the
company also announced they would be suspending many of their planned
projects. The second generation of Fire smartphone was include among
those projects and there is no indication it will be started up again
anytime in the near future.
When
Amazon first came out with their Kindle Fire tablet it started people
asking if there would be a smartphone to follow. Unlike the
mini-tablet market, the smartphone market was already heavily
saturated. So, to make their smartphone stand out Amazon loaded it
with unique features that did not exactly go over as planned. There
was the 3D perspective that looked spectacular but was not a feature
that anyone was clamoring to have in a phone. The fact that Amazon
has their own variant of the android operating system did not thrill
many users. Many of the other features; size, display, cameras,
processor, and battery; were average or just above. Possibly the
biggest problem with the smartphone was that Amazon tried pulling the
same move Apple did with their smartphone years earlier and limit it
to just one carrier.
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