Amazon Lures iPhone Buyers With Hot Android Phones for a Penny

 

We haven’t forgotten about you, Android fans, and neither has Amazon. Amid all the hype and adoring hoopla over the iPhone 4S and its just-born iOS 5, Jeff Bezos & company offers a respectable collection of Verizon Android handsets (and others) for a mere penny.


Certainly these must be some second-rate cellphones nobody wants, right? That’s what we thought until we gazed upon the choices Amazon has laid out for us for $.01, including the Motorola Droid Bionic 4G (that, for example, originally cost $299.99 with a 2-year contract), Motorola Droid 3 (that we favorably reviewed), Samsung Droid Charge(that gave us some of the best data speeds we’ve ever seen) and the coveted HTC Thunderbolt and HTC Incredible 2.

That’s not all — there are 31 flavors of serious smartphones that Amazon is practically giving away. Mostly are of the Android persuasion, but there’s an HTC Trophy for the Windows Phone crowd, and even three BlackBerrys in the mix (Bold 9930, Bold 9650 and Curve 9330) as well.

But wait. Giving away? Hardly. Of course, there’s a contract involved, so over the life of that agreement, you’ll be paying for the phones anyway. And there’s one last caveat, and here’s how Amazon might’ve gotten a break from Verizon: All activations associated with such phones must be brand-new, with a new line of service. Jeez, and we were getting excited there for a minute. So this is what Verizon acts like when it’s sold every single iPhone it can possibly get its hands on?

Take a look at the list of phones in Amazon’s “Penny-Pencher Sale,” and see if one of these highly capable handsets might lure you away from the cachet of paying an Apple tax. Well, maybe if the Samsung Galaxy S II were in there, we could be convinced.

[via DVICE]

Posted in: Mobiles