Amazon Fire Phone

The Amazon Fire Phone has been the tech disaster of 2014, a fact that has been abundantly clear since the first day of its launch. For the most part Amazon has stood by its ailing handset, but a write off of stock inventory to the tune of $174 million and tumbling losses through the third quarter have been hard to defend.

The Fire Phone had several issues; gimmicky features and a high price point were a turn off for consumers despite the solid specs the device boasts. Upon launch, the handset cost $199 dollars on contract, a figure that put it alongside industry heavyweights such as the iPhone and other Android flagships.
Senior Vice President of Devices David Limp told Fortune that pricing was the main issue behind the almost instant decline of the Fire Phone.
We didn't get the price right. I think people come to expect a great value, and we sort of mismatched expectations. We thought we had it right. But we're also willing to say, "we missed." And so we corrected.
Limp is of course correct, but there were other issues with the smartphone regardless of price. For example, the fact that the device felt like and acted like a conduit to Amazon's other services, meaning consumers felt like they were just being enticed to spend more money with the company. The result has been a phone that has flopped worse than any in recent memory, and it has probably killed any future aspirations Amazon had of continuing to build smartphones hardware.