Amazon writes-off $170 million because of Fire phone

A big chunk of that operating loss comes from a $170 million charge related to the write-down costs associated with the Amazon Fire smartphone. The extent to which the smartphone has flopped was revealed by Amazon’s Chief Financial Officer Tom Szkutak during a conference call with investors.

However, you could only download apps from Amazon’s Appstore. Amazon does the same thing with its Kindle Fire tablets, but for a tablet such a restriction is less of an annoyance, as long as the major apps are there, it isn’t a problem. But your phone is your “go to” device and Amazon was really asking you to invest in yet another eco-system, and consumers didn’t respond favorably.

Here at Android Authority we even took the bold step to publish a piece called “why the Amazon Fire phone will fail.” We don’t really like to blow our own trumpet around here, but we told you so.

But it isn’t all bad news for Amazon. The company has lots of cash and because of its diversity, Amazon is doing a lot of interesting (and hopefully profitable) things. It just recently announced the new Kindle Voyage, Amazon’s thinnest e-book reader with the highest screen resolution in a Kindle reader to date. Amazon Fire TV is now the best-selling streaming box on Amazon for the U.S., U.K., and Germany. Away from hardware, Amazon Studios is commissioning new TV series which will be shown exclusively on Amazon Prime Instant Video. Then there is Amazon Web Services (AWS), AmazonFresh, Amazon Game Studios, and so on.

In other words, Amazon took a bet on the Fire phone, it failed, it cost a lot of money, but Amazon will keep on rolling forward.