Amazon Drops Price of Fire Phone To $0.99 In Advance of Expected iPhone 6 Launch

It's no secret that Amazon's Fire smartphone (our review) hasn't taken off quite like the company has hoped, but let's face it: It's worth $0.99. Well, at least if you're willing to enter into a 2-year contract with AT&T, that is. It's undoubtedly a little odd that Amazon would drop the price of its Fire from $199 to $0.99 mere months after the phone's launch, but when you realize that Apple's about to launch its iPhone 6, it begins to make all the sense in the world.

There's more than meets the eye, though: Not only has the phone dropped to $0.99, Amazon is also tossing in a free one-year Prime subscription - a $99 value. Further, if you want to purchase the Fire outright, you can do so now for $449 (32GB), versus the $649 it has been. Clearly, Amazon wants to make a serious push on these.

While Amazon's coincidental timing is hard to ignore, the company could simply want to boost its overall units sold figure, because as it is, sales haven't been too impressive. At a mere $1, the Fire becomes an impressive combatant against the likes of the Moto G, although it must be said that the Moto G doesn't suffer some of the flaws of the Fire, such as a weaker app ecosystem and subpar 3D implementation.

I'm willing to bet that Amazon is going to learn from the wrongs of the initial Fire and make the next one a vast improvement, but for now, if you want a capable smartphone and fancy yourself a free one-year Prime subscription, it's pretty hard to go wrong with this deal (unless you don't like AT&T, of course).