Amazon slashes prices on 2 new Android phones for Prime members

If you're looking for a cheap smartphone, Amazon wants your business. The e-commerce giant is slashing prices on some Android phones, with the cheapest model starting at less than $50.

The catches? The discounts only apply to two specific phones, the new, fourth-generation Moto G and the new Blu R1 HD. The deals are only available to Amazon Prime members. And you can only get them in the U.S.A.

Wait, there's more. On the phone's lock screen, instead of your own photos or artwork, there will be a changing wallpaper showing Amazon deals, similar to how ad-supported Kindles work. You won't be able to change the lock screen, but if you get notifications, the deal will be "minimized" as one of your notifications.

The good part: The phones are brand-new phones, not old models, with good specs. The recently announced 5.5-inch Moto G ($149.99 with the Prime discount) packs a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 chip, 2GB of RAM, fast charging, a 13-megapixel camera and a microSD card slot for extra storage (internal can be 16 or 32GB).

While the Blu R1 HD ($49.99 with Prime) is lower on the Android scale, it's still respectable, with a 1.3GHz quad-core processor, dual SIM card slots and an 8MP rear camera. You can pick from either a model with 1GB of RAM and 8GB storage or a $59.99 model with 2GB of RAM and 16GB storage. Both have a microSD slot if you want to add more capacity.

I got a chance to check out the two Prime discount phones, and they both performed basic tasks — browsing the web, taking selfies, navigating maps and the like — perfectly fine (they were basically right out of the box). From the Gorilla Glass front of the Blu R1 to the soft curved backside of the Moto G, they both felt like premium designs, not discount-bin trash.

But after handling the phones for a few minutes, yet another catch became clear to me: When you set up your Prime phone, you'll be prompted to sign in with your Amazon account in addition to your Google account. This also means Amazon's apps — including Amazon's more full-featured Android app that isn't in the Google Play store — are pre-installed on the phone. And you can't delete them (we tried).

That's probably not much of a catch, given that anyone buying these phones is by definition an Amazon Prime member, but some users might be irked by an extra home screen folder full of apps you didn't install — in addition to all the default Google apps, like YouTube, Photos and Google+.

On the other hand, the phones are unlocked, so that means they don't havecarrier bloatware, at least. The Blu is GSM, so it only works with T-Mobile and AT&T, while the Moto G can work with any U.S. carrier.

Amazon's discounts are certainly attractive, and we could see them being interesting to prepaid customers. The Moto G is a fine phone for anyone on a budget, and the ultra-cheap Blu is not a bad deal, either. If Amazon wants to become a bigger destination for buying phones, there are a lot worse things it could have done than cutting prices.