Amazon re-enters phone market after Fire’s flop

NEW YORK — Amazon is back in the phone business — sort of.

After its own Fire phone flopped, Amazon is selling special editions of other manufacturers’ phones at a $50 discount. They’ll come with ads on the lock screen and lots of Amazon apps on the home screen. You can hide those apps, but won’t be able to uninstall them.

Amazon.com is touting the discount as a benefit of its $100-a-year Prime loyalty program.

Membership is required, and Amazon figures that those customers will appreciate having single sign-in access to Amazon’s various services without having to download about 10 individual apps for video, Kindle e-books, music and, of course, shopping.

Apart from the presence of Amazon apps, the new phones will bear little resemblance to the Fire. For one thing, there’s no hightech wizardry like infrared cameras to track your positions and make images appear to be 3-D. There’s also no Firefly technology for scanning bar codes, business cards and various products, though a lowertech cousin called Flow is available.

Most importantly, the new phones will run a standard version of Google’s Android system, rather than Amazon’s highly modified version, called Fire OS. That means the phones will run the range of apps available for Android.

The Fire phone ran only a subset, turning the phone into little more than a tool for directing users back to Amazon’s own services.

Seattle-based Amazon took a $170 million writedown related to the Fire phone in 2014 following mediocre reviews and lackluster sales.