Is Amazon taking on Apple on the eve of the iPhone 6 launch?
Amazon announced this morning that it has dropped the price of its Amazon Fire Phone to 99 cents with a two-year contract. On top of that, customers purchasing an Amazon Fire Phone receive a free 1-year subscription to Amazon Prime.
Here’s Amazon’s press release, which announces the offer and includes anonymous customer testimonials about the Amazon Fire Phone.
Amazon has not disclosed sales of the Amazon Fire Phone. Personally, I don’t know anyone who owns one. Here’s a quick straw poll done via my Facebook friends:
According to a study by UserTesting, testers really love the Amazon Fire Phone Firefly feature, a visual search app that can be used to drive Fire Phone users to make a purchase at Amazon.com. Eighty-four percent chose Firefly as their first or second favorite and, on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being easiest, 70% ranked it a 4 or 5 for ease-of-use.
But the testers did not like Firefly enough to buy the Fire Phone – more than half of participants said they would keep their phone and not buy the Fire Phone.
According to MacRumors, the iPhone 6 will contain NFC for a new payments initiative, and come in two sizes – 4.7 inches or 5.5 inches.
Here’s a video that shows what ma (or may not) be an iPhone 6: