According to numbers crunched by The Guardian‘s Charles Arthur and based on data from Chitika and comScore, it appears as if the Amazon Fire Phone isn’t exactly setting hardly anything on fire. In fact, if this report is to be believed, Amazon hasn’t sold more than 35,000 total Fire Phone units since the much-hyped unveiling of the device in June.
The Fire Phone has been plagued with countless problems since its unveiling, but what makes them worse is that they’re just fundamental mistakes rather than anything really wrong with the device itself. The Fire Phone isn’t a horrible piece of hardware at all. But it’s restricted to one carrier, ships at the flagship-level $200 price, and most of the features that might have given it a chance were really just gimmicks.
Where did this number come from? Chitika’s ad network pulls various information about a wide variety of devices and after 20 days, the company’s data showed that the Fire Phone only accounted for somewhere around 0.015% of all ad requests. You can combine this fact with comScore’s latest data which suggests that, at the end of June, there were 173 million smartphones active in the US. The result is that, roughly, after 20 days of sales, there were about 26,000 Fire Phones in use.
After some generous adjustment done by Arthur and even assuming that the Fire Phone was under-indexed in Chitika, it appears that as of today, it’s unlikely that Amazon has sold any more than 35,000 units. That a depressing figure and, while Amazon definitely made a statement with this phone that they want to enter the market, it doesn’t look like this exact device is going to really get them there.