I was at amazon (in the app store) when the fire phone was released, leadership made a big deal of showing of that they were using the fire phone for the first week or so and then got really quiet and where back on their iPhones.
The hardware specs were significantly behind what was standard on Androids of the time. Fire phones had only a slight price differentiation ($0.99 on a 2 year contract versus $199 for a Samsung Galaxy with a 1080p screen) and there were no commission incentives to push them, which made these a nonstarter.
99c vs $199 seems like a pretty big price differentiation.
I'm sorry, I just realised it's a typo and should be $99 vs $199. $1 did seem like a fair price for a Fire Phone in my defence.
oh, definitely. When I was first shown it I assumed it was a test model (it was common to get test models with big ugly casing pre-launch so any photos leaked looked didn't have much to go on), but nope, the big ugly thing was what shipped...