Amazon the global e-commerce behemoth has cut its prices for the Fire Phone, its flagship mobile handset to 99 cents from $198.99 only two months after the launch of the first smartphone by the company.
The version with 32GB will now be sold at $0.99 with a contract of two years, an Amazon Prime one-year membership and a number of services from its cloud, said Amazon in a prepared statement.
The Amazon announcement arrives just hours prior to the expected launch by tech giant Apple of its next generation iPhone.
In what is a first for the firm in e-commerce, the company, based in the U.S. launched its Fire Phones at $199 in June with a contract for two years with AT&T.
Ian Freed the Vice President of Amazon Devices said with access to Prime content, 32 GB of space, Mayday and free cloud storage that is unlimited for photos, the Fire is another great example of the value delivered by Amazon to its customers.
The device boasts a screen that is 4.7 inches, a quadcore processor of 2.2 GHz, RAM of 2GB, a rear 13-megapixel and front 2.1 MP camera and cloud photo storage.
Launched with a great deal of fanfare, the flagship device for Amazon came with Firefly a new feature, which identifies things such as games, books CDs and other when the camera points at them. It also can capture TV programs or songs and give users options to make a purchase.
The Amazon device competes in $150 billion global smartphone market with the iPhone from Apple and the Galaxy S mobile handsets by Samsung.
Amazon has not disclosed its sales figures for the Fire phone.
Amazon launched the Kindle e-reader its first gadget back in 2007.
Although a number of devices have followed the Kindle is still one of the most popular devices on the market for reading e-books.
