Amazon Fire Phone
amazon.com
amazon.com
"Your margin is my opportunity" is probably my favorite Bezosism. Given that perspective and Apple's very cushy margins, I expected Amazon not to approach the market with an expensive phone packed with new features, but to approach the market from the bottom, with a good phone that is free or nearly free. The problem, of course, is that Google seems to have that segment wrapped up.
Instead of competing with the iPhone, this seems to more targeted at Android -- only priced uncompetitively.
The features themselves seem slightly gimmicky. I tend not to want to move my phone physically as a way to interact with apps. (Doing that figure "8" when my GPS goes out for some reason is incredibly awkward.) Searching via photos is awesome, but the only use case it seems well suited for is shopping. The built-in Genius Bar is cool, but it seems targeted toward smartphone noobs, which is oddly coupled with features targeted to smartphone pros.
If I'm reading the tea leaves correctly, this will probably be a novelty, like Windows Phone, for a while to come.
There's also a degree of app quality that iOS still has over Android - I'm an Android user: 'Secret', for example, only just came out, and it's very unstable.
This is a mid-range smartphone at a premium price.
"Build quality" is such a meaningless term in common usage of smartphones, and speaks to personal subjective aesthetics, not some utility of purpose.
And this is all particularly interesting given that there's a good chance a significant part of the new iPhones will be made with plastic. But I'm sure it'll be a "better" plastic.
...so build quality is hard to quantify, and in most practical cases is subjective.
- Rubber breaks down faster than metal
- Rubber stains more than the metals you'd use in a phone
- Rubber can be torn, metal can't
So yes, objectively.
If you drop your phone a lot, rubber might help, but you'd need more than what the Fire phone provides.
No, it isn't objectively. You are subjectively choosing the criteria that makes one purportedly better than the other, yet they have zero applicability to the use or operation of a smartphone.
Grip matters very much with a smartphone. Rubber breaking down? Has anyone ever actually seen this happen? Is this actually a problem? Torn or stained? Again, is this actually a problem in the context of a smartphone? I would say no, it isn't at all.
A soft, comfortable, lightweight device that you don't have to immediately shroud in a protective case is, by actual use-based criteria, arguably the better "build quality". Build quality is suitability to purpose, not aesthetics or cult of material.
You have different criteria than robustness - understood, grip is important to you. Grip has its own objective measurements.
Christ.
If, however, I was an Android user, I would consider buying the Fire Phone as a replacement device, along with similar phones like the Samsung Galaxy.
You can sum up Google and Apple's market positioning in a tweet if you wanted. (Apple: premium phones, premium prices. Google: give away the software, monetize the search.) Amazon's positioning here is more vague, or perhaps nuanced.
The Galaxy S5 is a $600 device. The HTC One is a $600 device. The LG G3 is a $600 device. The iPhone is a $600 device.
I'm not seeing the price differential.
However, the notion that this competes with either Android or the iPhone is utter nonsense, and we saw exactly the same noise with the Kindle Fire. People seem to have some need to try to assuage their corporate leanings that it's "someone else's problem".
Only it's a smartphone. People buy smartphones, not brands, even if they have brand associations. This device, just like every device, is in the mix for people who are considering a smartphone and who don't attach their ego to a company.
So you would say this competes with nothing though?
You claimed that it was targeted at the iPhone based upon price, when many of the top selling Android devices are the same price as the iPhone.
So you would say this competes with nothing though?
I disagreed with any binary analysis of what it competes with. It doesn't compete with "either", it competes with both. People buy smartphones to provide information and value, and any possible smartphone is a potential candidate.
People that aren't interested in the high end features of smart phones as they are now - people who might even choose a flip phone - but will spend money shopping for traditional items.
Some studies say iOS users (as a whole) are more willing to spend money through their phone than other demographics, but are they willing to spend on what Amazon is selling? This seems to refer mostly to musics, apps.
Cover the internet/messaging basics, offer quick & easy support, make traditional shopping easy - plus add price comparisons and you may tap a large non-tech segment.
If I was bitten by a snake, spider, etc. I'd love to be able to snap a picture to quickly identify it and know whether or not to rush to the ER.
Or else just use their "Subscribe and Save" system on this item.
So yes, do call 911, but taking a picture could be potentially life saving.
~~~
Spider: Have a painful bite on the house!
User: "Spider say cheese!"
User: "Amazon Phone is this spider poisonous"
Amazon Phone: Searching. This Spider does appear to be poisonous.
User: "Amazon Phone call Uber 911"
Amazon Phone: Calling Uber 911
Uber 911: Can you collect the spider to take to the ER?
User: "Yes, I'll do that"
Many venoms have large delays, days even sometimes.
Black Widow: Have a painful bite on the house!
User: "Ouch!" *slap*
[one hour later]
User: "Oh my god, I am in unimaginable pain."
* User is driven to the hospital.
Brown Recluse: Have a painful bite on the house!
User: "Ouch!" *slap*
[several hours later]
User: This is starting to swell rather
disturbingly, and smarts quite a bit.
* User drives to their doctor
iPad: Kindle Fire, Nexus 7
Apple TV: Kindle Fire TV, Chromecast
iTunes: Amazon Prime Streaming TV + now music, Google Play
iPhone: Kindle Fire Phone, Nexus 4
I think they're all playing for the same territory. The big difference seems to be that Apple really only sells the technology. Google sells the technology so that they can sell advertising for third party products. Amazon has the only complete end to end solution where they sell you the products and advertise for their own "other stuff" they sell. IMHO Amazon is going to be the big winner in the long run. Whether or not that's good for all of us is yet to be determined.
Apple: Sell at high price, modest tie-in revenue.
Google: Sell at low price, modest tie-in revenue.
Amazon: Sell at low price, high tie-in revenue.
Apple: We sell an experience of software and hardware. Google: We sell ads, based on data we gather from our users. Amazon: We sell commodities\services as close as possible to the marginal utility, so we're very competitive.
Altough each of these tech giants are competing, each has quite a different strategy.
As for the Fire phone, I think that Amazon realized that they could deliver an excellent shopping experience from the mobile phone. This would enable massive future growth: Think about going home in the train and buying groceries instead of driving to your nearest Wallmart.
Plus most of their sales were B2B where brand loyalty means little for commodity products, esp. given the high tie-in strategy.
Revenue =/= profits. Amazon is a middleman and are only successful at generating revenue growth because they don't make profits.
If I'm interpreting that correctly, I don't see how that holds. People use smartphones/tablets/televisions to consume many things. Amazon products are just one of them.
I don't think that just because controlling the entire product ecosystem would work to Amazon's advantage means that customers will want a phone that enables that end-to-end control.
The end-to-end control works well for the Kindle, because eReaders are used really only for reading the books that are available only on Amazon's eReader marketplace. But I can shop Amazon from any device I want. So having a phone that owns that experience isn't a major value proposition for me. I'm much more interested in things like display, battery life, camera quality, sound quality, and the phone's popularity than which product ecosystem it taps into.
To me Amazon is working from a major disadvantage here. The technology doesn't seem mind-blowing, the device at first blush doesn't look remarkably different from what's already available, and since phones are largely subsidized by carriers, most customers aren't going to be hugely price-sensitive. If anything, people opt for the most expensive, newest phones. If Amazon is looking for the people who will spend the most money, they certainly won't be interested in customers who think $199 is too much to spend for a new phone that they will use every day for at least two years (which is a moot point since the phone is priced at $199).
Amazon sells you a device so they can show you an ad encouraging you to buy a rake. Amazon sells you the rake, has it delivered in 2 days, and makes 100% of the profit.
It's not that people will actively look for that integration, but that it exists gives Amazon a significant advantage imho.
That is clearly not the case with Amazon. "Just increases their profits" is pretty much the only thing that matters. Dominant market share comes much later, if at all. Dominant market share might even be a bad thing, if attaining it requires a race to the bottom. Most companies would (and should) prefer to sell a million devices with decent margins than 10 million devices with little or no profits. Amazon is known for pursuing market share at the expense of profits, but that's often not the best strategy and they can be excused for not taking it this time.
It's also better from a risk management perspective. For the first iteration of a device like this, it's less risky to try to sell a few of them at reasonable margins then to try to sell a gazillion of them at razor thin margins. The price of failure is far less, and depending on how this one does, then the next time around they can start adding cheaper models and gradually expand the user base. Or not, their choice. It's not always worth it.
Amazon sells you a rake made by a 3rd party who was put into FBA by a wholesaler and makes a reasonable cut of the profit in the process.
Amazon has more control but also takes all the blame when things go wrong.
Tbh, as someone who works at a business who does both the ads & selling stuff via Amazon as a manufacturer...Google actually makes more money off of us than Amazon does. I don't mean like a "little more money", I mean something like 5x as much money. This part is anecdotal obviously but I think you are very, very wrong in assuming that "Sell Product" > "Sell Ad".
Personally, I have a very much love/hate relationship with Amazon and I blame them, not the vendor.
I've had to issue a chargeback because of Amazon's incompetence...which most customer's probably haven't. It is literally the second chargeback I've ever had to do in my life, so it tends to stick with me more than it might for other people.
The eye tracking is nothing new and 3D as a sale gimmick crashed and burned years ago and I don't amazon doing anything revolutionary with it here.
If it were $200 unlocked then I can see it selling like crazy, but the current plan makes no sense, if amazon was providing the service as a MVNO and offered stuff like truly unlimited data and stuff then maybe, just maybe, but $199 for this phone and on AT&T? PASS....
Unless you only sell through Amazon, then a global comparison wouldn't be fair, because Google is semi-monopolist in ads while Amazon is far from it in retail. You should compare your average user acquisition cost with the wholesale margin left to Amazon; eg: how much does it cost to acquire through ads a user that buys products for $100? And how much of those $100 are left to Amazon?
When I say 5x, I mean Google gets 5x the amount of money than Amazon does. I think that is more relevant than a "per item" basis.
> Unless you only sell through Amazon, then a global comparison wouldn't be fair, because Google is semi-monopolist in ads while Amazon is far from it in retail.
It isn't my fault Amazon can't sell more of our products. ;)
> You should compare your average user acquisition cost with the wholesale margin left to Amazon; eg: how much does it cost to acquire through ads a user that buys products for $100? And how much of those $100 are left to Amazon?
That is a bad way of comparing for purposes of this conversation.
Amazon has to pay for shipping, pick & pack, customer service, return shipping, etc. That isn't free.
that would make it sound like amazon's current business model isnt working, which I think its doing pretty well. Amazon has razor thin margins for sure
Amazon's business model works. It just doesn't take "100% of the profits" by any stretch of the imagination.
Sorry if that was unclear.
If they can leverage that to reduce buying friction, then yes, that's exactly the right move!
At $199, my gut tells me that the early adopters of this phone will largely be people who already use Amazon regularly.
The term "big winner" to me implies that the thought process is that they will win out over Samsung and Apple in the long run, but I don't think that is very likely anytime soon. I don't hate the move by Amazon because you have to start somewhere, but predicting them the winner as this device is first launched is very optimistic in my eyes.
I see this a lot of HN, and I wonder if people are just assuming? To put it into context, I see far more ads on my iPad and iPad Touch than I ever have on my Nexus 5.
Outside of the money Google makes from their book, video, and apps stores, they sell the technology to ensure that their services remain viable, and cannot be cut out of the market. They make the platform so Google has less concern about being cut out of the ecosystem.
I mean we see the paradox on here constantly where people will gloat about how much more valuable iOS users are to advertisers, but then that Android is a platform for ads.
True, but let's not ignore that their core business is selling advertising. Before Android came along that business was at the mercy of Apple (in the mobile space anyway).
>I mean we see the paradox on here constantly where people will gloat about how much more valuable iOS users are to advertisers, but then that Android is a platform for ads.
Android isn't specifically a platform for ads, but it was indeed built so that Google wouldn't lose the ability to serve ads on mobile hardware.
The NFL is primarily sponsored through network agreements, which themselves are primarily sponsored through advertisers. Is the "core business" of the NFL, then, advertising?
Of course it isn't. Such an argument is specious to the point of uselessness, and only appears in the form of rhetoric. The NFL's core business is making an entertaining sports product that people like watching, and then they find ways to monetize from that.
Apple operates and promotes its own ad network, and its lack of success in that market doesn't somehow separate it from that reality. No one would claim that Apple's core business was iAds.
IBM's core business is monetization, by definition. Making services that enterprises like to use is what they do to feed that core business, not vice versa.
Walmart's core business is monetization, by definition. Selling goods that people like or need is what they do to feed that core business, not vice versa.
Toyota's core business is monetization, by definition. Selling cars that people like or need is what they do to feed that core business, not vice versa.
The local florist's core business is monetization, by definition. Selling flowers that people like is what they do to feed that core business, not vice versa.
Every for-profit's core business is monetization, by definition. Performing a large variety of things that make money is what they do to feed that core business, not vice versa.
Android has existed for the entire time mobile advertising was becoming huge. The iPhone was a big innovation, but in its first year it wasn't nearly the mass market device it is now, and its impact on mobile advertising at the time should not be overstated. Mobile and mobile advertising only started becoming really big in 2010.
I don't think Android was built with the specific goal to directly put Google's services into people's hands. I believe Android was built and released as free to be used by anyone to create an easy-to-use platform for any vendor with very capable connectivity features. It was hoped that this would increase use of Google's services on mobile, not because Google was forced into the market, but because people would have devices capable of web services in general.
Android seems to be made with a goal of making a market, not taking a market. That is why there is this diverse market for Android, and that's why all those associated problems exist. Its strategy also directly made possible this Fire Phone.
Aside from web content and occasional visits to the app store I don't think that I can ever recall seeing an advertisement on any of my iOS devices.
That said, it may be the case that web-based advertisements are targeted at and/or tailored for iOS/Mobile Safari.
If you mean website ads, then you can thank Google for that - I'm pretty sure that a significant majority of all web ads use Google's ad networks. Of course, thanks to Apple's double-tap for zoom, I usually bypass most of this visual cruft when browsing on my iPhone.
Amazon's dominance is always a 'future certainty', meanwhile Apple eats it's lunch.
i.e. "iTunes, Software and Services has been growing between 30% and 40% for four years and is on its way to $30 billion/yr in transactions and sales for 2014."
http://www.asymco.com/2014/05/09/measuring-not-getting-the-c...
Until Google or Amazon comes out with a truly gorgeous easy to use interface and a metal/glass phone I don't see them competing with Apple.
EDIT: Apparently the Fire Phone has a glass back, but it looks like plastic bevels. No thanks.
I think you are vastly under-estimating Apple's dominant position in the fastest-growing and most profitable category of "selling other stuff": digital content. Itunes is on track to $30 billion revenue this year with huge yearly growth several years in a row. That is almost half of all Amazon revenue combined! And presumably with vastly better margins, too.
In the next decades people will spend more and more on digital goods (Apple's turf), at the expense of physical goods (Amazon's turf). Amazon will do anything to avoid being leapfrogged that way. They have a very strong cloud infrastructure story, obviously, and are playing decent catch-up in many other areas, but in the grand scheme of things they are very far from the guaranteed winners.
The sci-fi firefly stuff is cool and very tempting, but I don't have a strong use case for it and it's not going to drag me out of my current phone ecosystem at that price point.
Imagine the point in time where anyone with a fire phone firefly's EVERYTHING they buy, before they buy it. Cheaper from Amazon, and free "2" day shipping? Killer feature. Never pay more again.
Fairly powerful for price conscious customers. Add in Spotify at $10 a month, Netflix at $10 a month ($240 a year, over $500 over the life of a 2 year contract), and you are getting the entire phone for FREE if you already have Prime.
At total value, if you wanted to have a "similar" phone with similar streaming services and content providing, you'd be paying more than if you bought this $200 phone, with a data plan you most likely will already have.
Looking at it that way, Amazon is paying you to use their phone. Understanding how the Prime model works, this makes a shit load of sense.
http://www.beyond-black-friday.com/2014/06/12/amazon-announc...
[1]: http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/uk-careers/jfsfis...
If you wouldn't pay for Prime anyway, the phone isn't very competitively priced.
I'm really surprised that they didn't feature this information in the price displays themselves for existing Prime members.
It seems that the most expensive thing here would be the mayday service. And maybe it's the killer feature here?
One big reason why seniors buy the iphone is that there are classes in the apple store which help them learn to use the device and overcome their fear of tech.So mayday could work well for that segment.
Also, many tech people hate coming home after work and doing tech support for their family. They could have a strong influence on their family members phone purchase decision.
And i'm sure amazon has got data from their mayday on tablet to estimate the value of mayday.
When I look at my low margin phone and service and almost non existent media consumption (nothing beyond shared cable or free streaming), I sort of doubt it.
This also doesn't mean they can't do a budget phone later.
[1] http://bgr.com/2013/12/17/amazon-prime-spending-study-cirp/
I don't need a "budget" phone, I can afford something much higher-end; but I still like to get value for price and in the face of the Nexus 5, the Moto G, the Moto E or the Lumia 635 all of which cost half or even less than a quarter of the price of the the Amazon Fire phone, it just doesn't look like a good value to me.
YMMV if the 3D perspective thing is that appealing to you, or you want a cellphone with a relatively very good camera, but neither of these are particularly important to me.
With Mayday, I think there is another side to that risk: if they only get the market segment of customers who use Mayday a lot, that can get expensive, especially since they promise "Help in 15 seconds or less" (they do weasel out of that a bit by stating that is the goal, but if it comes to a court case, I doubt that will fully absolve them if average response time is, say, 30 seconds)
It'd make sense to price the phone high at release, both to maximize revenues and establish the phone as expensive ('good' in consumer's minds), and then slowly mark the price down while your supply chain ramps up.
So it's useful for the single thing Amazon is most interested in encouraging.
No, there's still place for a great, cheap phone that's aimed at the consumer market rather than the geeks or the developers who usually buy Nexus devices.
Agreed. I'm having trouble visualizing how it moves from being novelty to being ubiquitous. I purchased one of the original Kindles back when it was a novelty, but I understand why it became the dominant eInk device since it was a novelty item with little to no competition. For the Fire, it's a novelty with stiff competition from the beginning.
As someone who rarely shops on Amazon and doesn't want a Prime subscription, why would I chose this phone?
Maybe the answer is Amazon doesn't expect this product to take off fast. Maybe it's a much longer term play initially targeted just to those already comfortably engaged in its ecosystem.
Uhh, you probably shouldn't and wouldn't. The smartphone market is a huge place, maybe they are just not trying to sell you this one?
edit: plus, if they really have strong kindle/amazon streaming, they could be looking to try and take some of hulu/netflix's thunder.
The 2 serious uses for it I can see are:
* Scrolling through things by tilting the phone. Personally I think this seems like a useful feature.
* Playing certain mobile games.
For general use, I don't think it'd be that helpful or aesthetically appealing other than "oh that looks cool". I don't really see the purpose of it when looking at maps, or especially looking at your home screen... In fact I imagine many people may find it annoying in many of the phone views.
Is that some sort of recognized gesture on your phone, or is it a way to calibrate a sensor?
Typically, the figure 8 is used to calibrate the magnetometer, but I can't see how it would help GPS.
This is the pilot model, which enables Amazon to earn revenue fast and capture early adopter surplus. We'll soon see a cheaper model with the more lavish and underused features trimmed, and other features much improved thanks to real world testing of the first model.
Seems for each interested buyer, I see ten who are more like "meh". Perhaps a rigorous demo of the phone's features would highlight it's "must-have" features.
3D? Ok, that is really cool. 2D hasn't really been a limiting factor for me though.
One-handed navigation and autoscrolling? Wow, that just sounds terrible. I'm trying to read and my kid bumps my arm. Now where am I on the page? And how do I quickly get back to where I was?
Mayday seems nice but then if the phone is that intuitive I can't see needing it much. Loss leader for them I guess.
Tangle-free premium headset. Finally, a feature I would pay money for. Seriously. Do they sell these separately? Because I want.
Oh, and the 3D -- is that really a 3D screen, or does it just change the screen when you move the phone, based on the position of your face relative to the front camera?
The most painful one is the camera button, it's the one killer feature of Nokia phones and Windows Phone.
(I have a Nokia N86 currently as my main phone).
(Yes, there are 6 cameras total: high-res back, mid-res front, plus 4 low-res for face-tracking.)
"Simply hit the Mayday button in quick actions and an Amazon expert will appear to help you via live video."
Still, you're right that Amazon offers great customer service so I'll give them props for Mayday.
Apple's essentially owned 'end to end' for a while - they design the chips and hardware, the physical retail stores, and handle customer support. The amount of info they have on problems people have and how to optimize for that must be huge. Amazon getting in on direct customer interaction for support will give them a similar, yet different, potential usability goldmine for years to come.
Or are you questioning whether a grandmother want's a smart phone? The answer is yes.
Turns out, if she wants to play games she'll grab a deck of cards.
Case in point, almost everyone I know takes pictures of books and items they want to buy or investigate further later. Currently this 1) clutters my Photos app with this overloaded behavior and 2) additionally requires me to then manually re-enter the information/remember to look it up. Just having Amazon scan and put it on some list for me is killer in my opinion.
Additionally, I've wanted something like X-Ray for so long and it seems so obvious. Shazam style movie/tv show detection and bringing up IMDB and other useful info on my phone is great. Having Airplay style functionality built into Samsung TVs and play stations is also great (hopefully we will move to a standard protocol to stream video content to TVs in the near future, but this is a positive step in my opinion from just Apple TV in Apple land and just Amazon TV in Amazon land).
I think Mayday may just be the feature though. People like me will have no use for it, but its definitely the case that most people don't really know what they're doing at all with their devices. The threshold for "user friendly" is so laughable right now. iOS AND Android really are quite complex for any non-standard task ("What does it mean I've run out of iCloud space??"). And this is not easily implementable I think -- it will take serious investment to copy this feature on other platforms, you can't get away with a half-baked software solution.
Also, many tech people hate coming home after work and doing tech support for their family. They could have a strong influence on their family members phone purchase decision.
I agree with you entirely on X-Ray. I don't have any Fire products personally but that's clearly a missing integration on the competing devices.
Go to town.
Let's say you have to browse through a bunch of stuff on your phone. The very moment you start doing this, you have a problem: There's a #%&! finger covering up the screen now!
The idea behind this phone is simple: All browsing of information is done by tilting the screen, leaving the display completely unobstructed... sure, other phones have tried to do this before. However, they were shit, because they didn't involve 4 years of AI research to develop the world's most sophisticated head positioning system ever, like Amazon apparently did. This is probably the only way to make the tilting accurate enough to not be annoying.
Only a company run by a fantically focused guy could put that much R&D towards such a specific and non-obvious feature.
That said, until I can hold the device in my hand and verify that this "tilt to browse information" is 100.00% perfectly implemented, this phone can still end up being a failure, like all similar devices that came before it.
Wouldn't you like a 6.7 inch phone that only takes 4.7 inches of space in your pocket?
(That said, only time will tell if I am right)
It's like when I'm holding onto something; I just move my thumb off to let go.
But I would love to see solid, intuitive improvements in UI like this.
Unless I'm wearing mittens, it's never been a problem in ~6 years of smartphone use.
And despite Sergey Brin claiming it's emasculating to touch a screen, I still find the experience a bit magical.
Really I don't see the Fire as being any different than what Samsung has done: it's harder and harder to innovate on hardware, so you come up with some whimsical feature that solves a problem few actually have.
But who knows! Maybe it's just great.
That said firefly and the dynamic perspective looks very cool. Not sure how often I'll want to scan the world around me but maybe I'm wrong. The DP seems more like the thing that would affect everyday more radically. Hopefully it doesn't get gimmicky and annoying and instead seems like what it should have always been like all along.
If there's significant adoption, it could enable some gimmicky gameplay :) (like Nintendo DS) or gimmicky apps.
Maybe one of those turns into a killer feature and we'll see the next gen of smartphones playing catch-up.
It's an interesting gamble.
At which point I use the abductor pollicis brevis, adductor pollicis, etc. to do something quite amazing: I move my thumb out of the way. Alternatively, I can use the same muscles to scroll the screen to a point such that I can see any obstructed content.
The benefit of this method is that I maintain my original viewing angle. I also have finer motor skills in my thumb than in my wrist, and thus I suspect I have greater control.
(FYI: Might want to tone it down a bit. You sound like an astroturfer.)
If that's the main thing the Amazon Fire has to offer I'm really not impressed.
Tilt-based interaction has existed for years on iOS and Android using the accelerometers. It's not a responsiveness or tracking issue, it's that interacting with screens at oblique angles is annoying and many times tilt/rotation interactions require pretty large arm movements compared to finger movements, limiting when and where they're useful. Maybe Amazon made it so amazing these can be overlooked or they were solved, but I'm not buying into the idea just because it uses cool computer vision technology.
I actually agree with you, I'm just saying "Hold on guys, a rational argument can at least be made that this isn't just a stupid gimmick"
...but we have to try the device to know for sure...
Thus my objections to Fire Phone. It seems like a lot of gimmicks and little actual solving of real problems.
When I saw the tilt features, I was very confused. Tilt the phone's screen away from you in order to read Yelp reviews? What? So in order to get more details, I need to make the device harder to read. Maybe it is a good feature, but the examples just make it seem like a gimmick that will get in the way.
As someone with some experience with amazon's kindle labs, IMHO, the only accurate part of this statement is that Amazon invested 4 years in it.
Also Bezos isn't focused - he's a micro manager, who is constantly muddling the work of the people he's hired, to ill effect.
It's a smack in Apple's face that they took a feature that iOS 7 had as a utterly useless and distracting gimmick and did something useful and disruptive with it.
I think Apple's face is blissfully smack-free after this particular announcement
I bought a Nexus 5 this year and kind of pre-regretted it because I thought I should wait to see what Amazon came out with when they announced their long-rumored phone, but now I feel great about it. None of the much touted features here are really things I care about, though I get that my perspective is not universal (eg. Mayday might be great for my mom(1), but not useful for me. Ditto unlimited cloud storage, I already need a long term solution for the images I take with my Canon 70D and Sony A7 cameras, having something that is unlimited only for the small set of cellphone camera photos I take isn't useful for me; YMMV if all you use to take photos is your cellphone, but even in that case I would be reluctant to tie myself to Amazon in that way since it becomes a friction point to upgrading to a different kind of phone in the future).
The glass back doesn't help things either; I learned that lesson with the Nexus 4 -- never again. And lastly the price isn't very attractive in the recent world of inexpensive but powerful Android phones, especially when you're tied to AT&T.
(1) [except for the fact that the most likely big problem someone like her would run into is not being able to connect to the network in the first place, which is obviously not a problem Mayday is well equipped to help with]
Forgive me, but this was the first thing I thought of. (A collection of clips from television commercials for as-seen-on-tv gadgets, showing helpless ordinary people trying to do things like slice tomatoes, etc…)
but apparently only you and I care about not having a finger on top of what you are reading.
This seems like a phone from two or three years ago where $650 for a non-premium brand would have been passable. I just bought a Moto G LTE for my wife and its a wonderful phone. I don't see what Amazon would bring to the table for an extra $420. That's almost 10 months of service right there.
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/09/28/amazon-kindle-fir...
I can tell you from experience 0 of the ones I've encountered outside the IT/Startup space were aware of that is what it does.
Probably around the same number who care that their traffic is going through Amazon first.
If you put it in terms they understand, they care.
https://www.eff.org/2011/october/amazon-fire%E2%80%99s-new-b...
Also, Amazon has most of its customers banking information already.
And if they pushed an update to change this [even accidentally], how would you know?
How would you know if any browser pushed an update [even accidentally], with this side effect?
2) Silk is the only one I know of that a mere coding error could cause this. It isn't like Chrome and Firefox have a fleet of machines and code designed to act as an always-on proxy.
Not many, but more than would understand or care about the "man in the middle attack browser" argument.
Radiant: 480 x 800 G: 720 x 1280
Radiant has a much smaller battery.
G has quad core, radiant has dual.
G has 8gb of storage. Radiant has 2 available to user.
Moto G comes in an LTE flavor for $30 more, no option with Radiant.
Radiant is also forever stuck on 4.1 while the G continues to get updates and will probably get some for some time.
Moto E: Dual-core 1.2 GHz, 4.3 inches, 540x960, Internal 4GB, 1GB RAM, MicroSD, 5MP Camera, 854x480 Video, HSDPA, Li-Ion 1980 mAh, Android 4.4
Price: $130 @ Amazon
ZTE Radiant: Dual-core 1.4 GHz, 4.0 inches, 480x800, Internal 2GB, 1GB RAM, MicroSD, 5MP Camera, 1280x720 Video, HSDPA, Li-Ion 1735 mAh, Android 4.1
Price: $75 @ Amazon
The Moto E and the ZTE Radiant do not have identical specs. But the Radiant is half the cost at almost the same specs. It's clearly a better value. If you can't stand not having the latest Android you can install many custom ROMs, or just wait a year or two for another dirt-cheap phone with a newer version and buy that.
Scroll down to family plans. Now a new line just costs $15 if its a phone not on a contract. Else its $40
http://www.att.com/media/att/2014/support/images/MSV_Image_3...
With a 10GB plan you end up paying $800 for the phone ($199 up-front, and $25mo extra) under the 2 year commitment plan. Definitely a better deal to just pay $650 up-front.
In any case, I'm with Aio Wireless, now Cricket Wireless -- same network, but much better deal, plus unlimited everything.
Maybe it works well for others but I find it getting very much in the way when I use my phone in bed, or lying around on the couch, or walking even. On my iPhone 5, I have the screen rotation locked for about 99% of the time.
I can't imagine it's small, so they must be not "always-on", which means there is some tradeoff here.
Question: Does it seem like it requires the camera system to make it usable or could it be done reliably with just the accelerometers now common in smart phones?
More people need to copy the old HP stuff where you used the bezel for navigation and commands.
Google Nexus 5 is already huge, but it still weighs only 130g, and at least it has 1920x1080 resolution and only costs 349$.
For 649$, I might as well buy iPhone 5s, which only weighs 112g. Yet it probably has the exact same battery life, due to the more efficient software!
Keep in mind, both Nexus 5 and iPhone 5s are almost a year old now, and this thing is a brand new platform with such unappealing specs? Gimme a break!
There is a significant comfort difference between light phones in the 100-150g range (latest iPhone, Nexus, Galaxy) and heavy phones in the 150-200g range (e.g. most Nokia Lumia phones, phablets).
720p for 4.7" doesn't bother me, as that's still full fidelity at 11". http://isthisretina.com/
It's not so much the fidelity as it is about the screen real estate. People tend to hold the phones much closer to their eyes than tablets, so, the extra pixels don't go wasted.
How sad. A phone is the most intimate piece of technology we have, and all Amazon can think about making it a machine of consumption.
I wish they would have focused more enabling people to create things. You know, help them be active. Help change the world.
There's just a slight hint here that Amazon considers its users more like mindless money-spending media consuming drones.
A new device very rarely push the human race forward. The Kindle Phone is clearly no such device.
As others have mentioned, the price seems to be difficult to swallow. They'll be fighting against Samsung's flagship Android device and the iPhone.
What sells the Amazon phone at that price? I don't think 3d tilting gimmicks will.
Its primary differentiator versus other Android phones is that Amazon controls the ecosystem for this device, rather than Google, and while that will appeal to some, it will be a negative for others, and a non-factor to many.
I think the price needs to drop for this to be a real competitor, but I certainly am glad to see Amazon entering the game even if the initial offering doesn't seem to be a home run. More competition against Samsung and Apple is good.
Also, isn't this going to be decimated by Google X's Project Tango?
Sometimes, I wonder if Google is going to collectively vanish out of our universe once it has collected every piece of data that it can from this one.
But I have a superior app store.
The only big feature I think could prove important is their live-chat help.
I'm not saying things like that make up for the inferior app store, just that it's really cool.
Obviously things are different in the US,but in UK it's almost unfathomable to be paying anything for the phone if you are getting a contract. Sometimes the latest iphone will have an upfront cost of 29 pounds, but it's rare.
My observation is that the telcos will often offer the more expensive phones on higher tariffs, and that it's cheaper over 12/24 months to buy a phone off-contract, and then get the cheapest SIM-only plan for your needs.
Here's EE's page for a 16GB iPhone 5s. Prices range from 9.99 to 149.99 depending on the plan chosen:
http://shop.ee.co.uk/mobile-phones/pay-monthly/iphone-5s-16g...
Look at the next model up, 32GB, and the up-front cost increases significantly:
http://shop.ee.co.uk/mobile-phones/pay-monthly/iphone-5s-32g...
Here you can buy the 16GB iPhone 5S for £0 up front, on a £33pm contract.
http://www.dialaphone.co.uk/plans?upfrontPriceRange=Free&tar...
Firefly has a chance though. I've spent some time with google goggles before, and I wasn't super impressed (have they updated it much recently?) --- on the other hand, I've had some success with Amazon's Flow app, in which you point your camera towards a product (in a store, for example), and it tells you the Amazon price for it. Will Firefly work well enough for people to rely on it on the host of use-cases that Amazon gave in its presentation?
Other quick thoughts: Amazon claims some great battery life on the page, but didn't mention it at all in their presentation today. Also, it's kind of weird to think I would have 6 cameras on me at any point in time. Are those cameras accessible to developers, beyond their dynamic display apk? Lastly, how will this compare with google's "Project Tango" efforts?
As for the battery life, there have been some amazing initiatives and innovations to squeeze every ounce of juice from it. I wouldn't be surprised if the stats claimed on Amazon.com were indeed right.
Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but I do not represent them, or speak on their behalf.
Mine's in my pocket when I'm at the store.
However what set Kindle Fire apart from competition and allowed it to gain foothold in the market was competitive pricing, I see none of that here. Amazon is obviously making a bet that software they are shipping with the phone will be a killer feature that will overcome the shortcomings, I do not think broader market will agree.
[0] Until you look at the price and AT&T only lock in, considering that, specs are mediocre at best.
If the barriers to get users to spend money are lower on Amazon's phone, then this is exactly the right move to capture developer and content producer mindshare for their ecosystem!
I really wish Amazon would just make all of their obviously Android devices into actual, Google-approved Android devices. Google Apps and all. I get that they want their own market for apps, etc. But yuck.
Also, I wish things like Amazon Movies would just stinkin work on Android devices, like a normal app. I mean, come on... I have like 6 Android devices, 1 Kindle Fire, 1 TiVo, and 1 Roku. Why are the 6 Android devices left behind? Ug.
/whine
The only reasons I can come up with are a) money (AT&T taking a smaller cut of subsidies/paying the manufacturer more for the device) and b) "portability" between the US provider and International providers.
Are there any other reasons? Or is it really that simple?
https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/devices/fire-p...
Currently I have the old DXG and the first Paperwhite, having also had the unit preceding the Paperwhite. Whilst the Paperwhite is fantastic for novels, the DXG whilst nice and big is dragging its heels now with no software updates in a long time.
I am wishing for an even higher higher resolution screen with colour for reading technical books (some illustrations tend to become unreadable in grey-scale), and reintroduction of side buttons.
Meanwhile, where's email, photography, calendering, web browsing, contact management and sync? Who's their map data provider? You know, all of the stuff that you actually depend on a phone to have day to day?
You would think that Android's vaunted Intent system would be perfect for this, but Intents are basically dead for cross-system functionality, there few open Intents published with android.intent.action., a lot of the good stuff is published by google as com.android. (which should really be com.google.*) so you can't rely on it unless you know you're running on a google phone.
Google is not really working towards the interest of AOSP, it should be taken from Google's full control and placed under a neutral body so its full potential for developers can be realized.
Market fit is really interesting and confusing (see nostromo's comment at the top for great discussion).
I'm a little tired of the tech giants trying to convert every digital thing I do in my life to their platform. I like my iPhone with my Amazon Prime with my Dropbox thank you. I realize they're trying to include more people on the platform and just want another point of entry, but I hope people still standup for their own choices instead of going all in on one of the big players.
Lastly, what does this continued push on custom android oses mean for Android development? You already have a host of operating system versions and screen sizes to deal with when developing for android, now there are more and more custom OSes with different features. You'll submit to different stores and have different apps? Blagh..
> Pre-order Now
> This item will be released on July 25, 2014.
E.g. even http://oneplus.net/one will likely come sooner than this! And at half the price, plus much better specs!
I still think that 4.7" Fire @ 160g and 5.5" OnePlus One @ 162g is way too heavy for a phone. At least OnePlus One has a much bigger screen, comes at half the price, and has more DYI OSS under the hood.
iPhone 5s is only 112g, Google Nexus 5 is 130g, iPhone 5c is 132g, Amazon Fire Phone is 160g.
The extra 30g to 48g is very noticeable in your pocket, and you're not even getting a bigger screen, plus if you compare with iPhone, those extra 48g don't even seem add extra battery life, since iOS is just so much more efficient.
I'm not interested in making any predictions as far as how the phone will fare against Apple and Android, as this is literally a few hours old.
Amazon expert will appear to help you via live video
Although I've never used it, Mayday is a human being with a camera and they can control your device. I first assumed that they saw you, as well, which made me sad about the horrors they'd be inflicting upon poor contractors, but I'm told they cannot see you. I still don't know.
I'd much rather phones (and computational/communication devices in general) focus on content creation.
no hairy workarounds to replace an iphone in your mac ecosystem, which is something google has not achieved.
(yes, other than apps, but that will follow)
If anything I see this phone getting cheaper/better very quickly, much like they did with their tablet product.
Anything that competes with Apple, Samsung, Google is by default good. There is definitely space in the market for a phone like this. Amazon phones set to sell much more than Amazon tablets.
I wonder whether they would sell a left-handed version…
This bullshit tie-in with Prime and some stupid streaming crap I don't want has just left a sour taste in my mouth.
Firefly technology: Advertising wet dream, in reality a cheap OCR meets keyword database (pay to be listed?). Not indifferent to certain Firefox plugins re: post-OCR recognition, not indifferent to other phones re: OCR capability. It's just a wrapper. Real world use cases? Limited. Conclusion: gimmicky.
Mayday: Video support? Totally gimmicky.
Bonus US-market centrism. Unimpressed.
If Amazon build a phone that they believe is better than other smart phone on the market, wonderful, I hope they sell a bunch of the an make a profit. Honestly though: It's a smart phone like any other, but with a gimmicky feature and similarly priced (over-priced).
When I heard Amazon would have a phone, I thought for sure it would be very cheap, possibly even free with Prime membership. That would be a game-changing move.
Now, it's just another Android phone, albeit with a couple extra bells and whistles. But with an inferior app store.
I don't care if they can see I'm ugly. I know that already as does everyone else.
Messaging is really important.
Seriously though, implementing hardware features that make cases unworkable would put a damper on sales.
Not cheap either...
what are they trying to do? put nails in the firefox phone/firefox OS coffin?
Emma Watson
was my first reaction.
FireFly also sounds very similar to FireBug.
"It's almost like the world is a hyperlink."
That right there is gold! That is UX victory and low friction for users in a nutshell.
When the device is used for phone calls <1% of the time, can we now call this something else? Maybe:
"Pocket Internet System"? PIS?
If you use your phone for actual phone calls more than 5%, let us know.