Amazon unveiled it’s Fire Phone in June and despite using Apple jargon to try and promote it– it didn’t sell very well. And when I say it didn’t sell very well, I mean that there were boxes upon boxes of unbought phones– $83 million dollars worth of them.

Who can blame anyone for not buying the phone, though, they were badly conceived and positioned in the market place. First of all, an off contract price for the phone was a steep $700 and even then it was tied exclusively to AT&T. The on contract price was still $200 initially before being dramatically cut to $0.99 cents just ahead of the Apple iPhone event this past September.

What do you get with this phone? Android minus any of Google’s services for the phone. Sure it had all of Amazon’s services built in and an app store– but the apps available weren’t as refined as the ones available on other, cheaper, Android phones. You did get one free year of Amazon Prime with the phone but after iFixit did a teardown of the phone and worked out the build cost of it to be about $205, I’ll use the word “free” very loosely as it’s apparent they just tacked the cost into the phone.

So what we ended up with is an overpriced, locked in and deliberately hindered phone. Is it any wonder that no one bought this phone? The Fire Phone was the single biggest contributor to Amazon’s loss of $437 million for the past quarter which plunged it’s price 8% to $287.10.

If you’re looking for a new phone, stay tuned, because there’s a massive fire sale coming soon. Oh puns, I love you!

[via Geek.com]