Fire sale: Amazon is clearing out its smartphone for £99

Amazon's smartphone had a lukewarm reception.
Amazon's smartphone had a lukewarm reception.

Amazon is having a 24-hour fire sale of its 32GB and 64GB Fire Phone smartphones for £99 and £149 respectively. That sale is only taking place in the UK and both models are still being flogged full price in the US.

They are locked on O2 (you cannot unlock them anywhere) and Amazon is still selling contracts for £28 and £33 per month respectively.

On paper, the phone should be a no-brain winner at this price. It's an LTE model with a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800, the same that powers the Sony Xperia Z or the LG G2, both former high-end handsets from the 2013 cuvée.

Add 2GB of RAM, 32GB onboard storage, unlimited Cloud storage, 802.11ac, automatic back-up to cloud, a 13MP camera, a premium audio headset and a 4.7-inch display and you pretty much have a phone that's unbeatable. Or that's the theory.

Blame the software

Sadly, the phone is only available on O2 and you cannot unlock it. Then there's the Fire OS, Amazon's forked version of Android which is customised to include everything you might need to become addicted to Amazon.

That means Mayday, Firefly, Dynamic Perspective, X-Ray and even, on the full priced models, Amazon Prime, its one-day parcel delivery and unlimited streaming service.

We gave it a 2.5 star score when we reviewed it, which goes a long way to say that most smartphones out there are probably a better buy.

Still, if you've got money burning your pocket or if you can live with the Fire Phone's quirky interface, then you've got only a few more hours to buy it at this discount price.

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.