It looks like Amazon has made a strategic withdrawal from the Android smartphone market. According to Geekwire, the retail giant has stopped selling its Fire Phone—probably for good.
The product page for Amazon’s Android-based smartphone shows the status of both Fire Phone models as "Currently unavailable," with a note explaining that Amazon doesn’t know when the device will be back in stock. A spokesperson for the company confirmed that the worldwide supply of Fire Phones has been exhausted.
Amazon’s entry into the smartphone market never gained a significant amount of traction (and it only made the jump to Kit Kat back in May). We had both good and bad things to say about the Fire Phone in our initial review of the device last July, but it appeared clear that above all else the Fire Phone was designed as a tool to make it more convenient for people to buy things from Amazon and consume Amazon content. We liked the Firefly visual search function, but it just wasn't enough to make the device worth buying—especially given that Amazon's FireOS added yet another poorly supported, upgrade-lagged fragment to the Android world.
Geekwire reports that Amazon sold a combined total of 12,960 Fire Phones across all available models. (Correction: the 12,960 figure is for one Ebay seller, not Amazon as a whole). The Fire Phone’s lower-than-expected sales and weak penetration into the market reportedly led to first a reorganization and then to layoffs in Amazon’s "Lab126," the hardware development center responsible for the Fire Phone’s design.
Farewell, Fire Phone. We hardly knew ye.
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