It's been a while since we last checked in with the Fire Phone, Amazon's attempt to break into the high-end smartphone market. That's because, well, the phone really hasn't gone anywhere. The phone's unlocked price dropped from $649 at launch all the way to $199 in November, and it's down to $189 as of this writing. That price tag still includes a free year of Amazon Prime (normally $99 a year). Perhaps worst of all, the company took a $170 million writedown on remaining Fire Phone inventory and supplier contracts late last year. None of these things are an indicator of strong sales.

Still, for those who have taken the plunge, Amazon continues providing software updates. Fire OS 4.6.1 includes a fair number of changes, but the largest is one Amazon doesn't mention—it updates the underlying version of Android from 4.2 Jelly Bean to 4.4 KitKat. KitKat is still a year-and-a-half old at this point, but that's a year newer than Jelly Bean, and it's still the most-used version of Android according to Google's developer dashboard.

KitKat is responsible for a bunch of the new things Fire OS picks up, including Bluetooth 4.0 support, improved accessibility, printing support, security and accessibility features, and an emoji keyboard (Amazon uses unchanged versions of Google's emoji, the same you'd see on a Google-blessed Android phone). The Fire Phone still lacks support for Google's closed-source apps and APIs (much to the detriment of its ecosystem), but if it ended up in the open-source bits of Android 4.4, then it should be here. A handful of Fire OS-specific features, including lock screen notification improvements and the ability to change the home screen wallpaper, have also been added.

However much the software improves and however cheap the hardware gets, the Fire Phone will be remembered first for its tepid initial reviews and even more tepid sales. A critical writeup in Fast Company earlier this year painted a picture of a team creating a phone for CEO Jeff Bezos' needs rather than the needs of Amazon's customers. And without an unlockable bootloader, the device hasn't become a darling of the modding community as the early Fire tablets did. When Amazon's supposed second smartphone rolls around, at least buyers can be assured of a decent (if not prompt) string of updates.