[ntsb]

Amazon's phone is not about competing with the iPhone, and the $0.99 price is not about it failing. Amazon's end-game is the ecosystem, which now gives free Prime with the phone among a lot of other benefits that appeals to a lot of people. This price drop is about enticing more people into the ecosystem, from which Amazon will profit off of maybe 10 years from now (they are in it for the extreme long term). The phone is not about selling phones, it's about selling other Amazon products and services. Even if they only capture 1/2 a percentage of the market, that is a lot of new customers locked into the ecosystem.