Amazon's Fire Phone is only four months old, and yesterday Amazon cut its price all the way down to $199 unlocked (it launched at $649). If the company's $170 million writedown last quarter wasn't enough evidence that the phone was doing poorly, this should be all the evidence you need.

The phone is now at a price where you could buy one to play around with if you had $200 you couldn't conceivably find a better way to spend (here's a long list of better ideas). Even at $199, you shouldn't buy a Fire Phone to use as your regular phone. This is both because of the problems we had with the Fire Phone in our review—its heavily customized version of Android leaves a lot to be desired, its app ecosystem is mediocre-to-poor, and its gimmicky 3D cameras make it larger and heavier than it really ought to be—and because this "fire sale" doesn't bode well for future software support. The company apparently remains committed to the smartphone market, but it can't keep losing money on hardware forever.

The Fire Phone does have redeeming qualities. We found its camera to be a good performer, and Firefly was a pretty interesting feature that we'd still like Amazon to port to some other ecosystems. Even at $199, it comes with a free year of Amazon Prime (a $99 value). But a couple of compelling features and decent internal hardware don't necessarily add up to a phone that's worth your time or money. Whether the Fire Phone costs $649 or $199, we'd recommend against it.