When Amazon pulled back the curtain on its new smartphone, the industry reacted with muted excitement. The Fire phone, which offered up some fancy features like eye-tracking and 3D imagery, was relatively mundane.
Sure, the features sound great, but in practice they offer little use, and all the reviews of the device basically said the same thing; it’s a decent phone but all of the fancy extras are kind of pointless. Even the Fire Fly app, which got its own dedicated button, is kind of neat seeing that it can read text from images and pull down content from Amazon to allow for quick purchases, but it is an app and there is nothing stopping Amazon from porting it to other platforms.
So how well is the Fire Phone selling? Abysmal, if you can trust some back of the napkin math. We say that because Amazon does not release the sales figures of individual devices, which means that we will likely never know how well (or poor) the phone is performing in the market.
But the folks over at the Guardian, they have used two different market signals to work backwards to determine the sales figures; those sources being Chitika and ComScore. By using how often a Fire Phone showed up on an ad-network (Chitika) and how large the US smartphone base is (ComScore), you can determine a rough approximation of the number of phones sold, and that figure is roughly 35,000 in the first 20 days after the device was available. You can check the source for all of the math behind the calculation, and it does take into account the inconsistencies in the statistics used for the for reaching the numbers.
The figures, if accurate based on the publically available information, will be a huge disaster for Amazon who likely spent tens of millions of dollars (if not more) will have seen that go to waste.
Amazon isn’t commenting on sales figures at this time, but you can bet that if they were anything to brag about, they would have put out a press release by now.
Source: The Guardian
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