Last month when Amazon’s rather unpopular Fire Phone smartphone was released in the UK it landed as a dedicated O2 exclusive. For those of you outside of the UK, O2 is one of the leading networks carriers. As such it was either a hit or miss move as to whether such an exclusivity would work in the UK as typically speaking exclusives tend to do less well than when released across all the major UK networks. That said, after the recent reports of how poorly the Fire Phone is selling in general it does not necessarily seemed to have mattered whether the Fire Phone was an O2 exclusive or not.
Either way and regardless of the (un)success of the Fire Phone it seems the bigwigs at Amazon and O2 may have gotten along much better than anyone would have thought. The lack of Fire Phone sales does not seemed to have dampened their relationship and to the contrary may have even strengthen it. Today it seems Amazon have added a new service to their UK site which put simply allows UK residents to purchase monthly contracts on O2 through the Amazon site. In short, it looks as though Amazon has become a contract re-seller. The real interesting bit though is that all the current contracts listed on the newly added service are all O2 contracts. Amazon is not actively advertising this as an O2 exclusive service (unlike the Fire Phone) but regardless it does seem as you scroll through the various smartphones on offer they are all only available through O2. This does go some way to showing the strength of the relationship which might be developing between the two.
In terms of what’s on offer, there does seem to be a good selection available. To list just a few of the handsets being touted on the first page there is the Motorola Moto X, Sony Xperia Z3, Samsung Galaxy S5, Google’s Nexus 5 and the Blackberry Passport. As mentioned all contracts are only available via O2 although all the handsets do also list the off-contract price. Typical of the UK market (and unlike the US) virtually all the devices are being listed as nothing down (upfront in UK terms) and are currently available to both new contracts and upgrading customers. You can check out the full list of O2 available on-contract devices by clicking here. Whether this means we will see more exclusives heading O2’s way is yet to be seen. However, it does at the very least highlight that tensions cannot be too bad between the two after the Fire Phone.