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I'm taking the opposite stance, this is a stupid gimmick until proven otherwise. Scrolling with my finger can happen on the very edge of the screen or area of interaction and it's easy to move out of viewing obstruction.

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.

> this is a stupid gimmick until proven otherwise

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...

> this is a stupid gimmick until proven otherwise

Thus my objections to Fire Phone. It seems like a lot of gimmicks and little actual solving of real problems.

> it's that interacting with screens at oblique angles is annoying

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.

Yeah those example really don't sound appealing. Basically instead of hiding additional options in a slide-out menu you can now tuck them to the side of your app and make users tilt their head or hand to find them.

> There's a #%&! finger covering up the screen now!

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.)

It's not about your finger being in the way necessarily, it's about usability. Supppose I'm eating lunch. It would be nice to read an article with my phone in one hand and hold my sandwhich in the other. Or if I'm lying in bed just reading. It would be great to not have to keep scrolling the phone with my other hand. I'd rather my phone just do it for me.

Can you not do all of that with one hand already? Reading while eating is actually harder if you need to tilt the device rather than swipe your finger. You could always place the phone on the table and just use your finger, or move the phone while you eat to keep it in your view without any of the tilting being interpreted as other things by the phone.

Or hold it with one hand and scroll with your thumb. Either way, not a compelling argument, you still need to use your hand.

Still seems gimmicky because I can easy flick and scroll on my phone using one hand.

If that's the main thing the Amazon Fire has to offer I'm really not impressed.

I've never heard of evidence that auto scrolling behavior is actually better UX as a general design decision for scrollable content. In fact, I've heard the opposite: when users can't control the scroll of content or scrolling is difficult to achieve, they give up more easily on their task.

Everyone's experience is different I guess, but I have never once in my life found myself trying to peer around my own finger. Touching the screen to control where I want information to move is intuitive and precise. Tilting a screen is, for me, very counterintuitive and imprecise.

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.

Exactly. I've never felt like it was a fundamental issue because I can always move my finger. My biggest concern is this will be the new phone rotation that I always turn off because as soon as I want to read in bed it'll start to scroll constantly. Maybe they've figured this out but knowing the correct orientation plane to start, figuring out that I'm simply moving myself around or temporarily putting the phone down and I don't want it to scroll, or any of the many other similar scenarios seem very problematic to me.

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.

I noticed it most glaringly in playing Samurai vs Zombies. You tap to the right or left of your character to move them, and that means that my finger is directly in the way of seeing whether there are enemies to interact with.

Fingers are very bad for some games, menu-based RPGs for example :) but those weren't good ports to Android.

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.

That doesn't really seem compelling to me. I've never felt the problem of having my finger in the way while scrolling, and I'm pretty dubious of tilt scrolling. I'll reserve final judgement until I've had my hands on the phone or seen other people's hands on reviews, but right now this really seems like a solution in search of a problem.

My hypothesis is that adding this feature to a 4.7 inch device has the potential to make the user experience equivalent to maybe a 6.7 inch device, because a finger covers up the equivalent of 2 inches worth of screen real-estate.

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)

Do you keep your finger on your phone while reading a page? I flick, read, flick, read, etc.

Unfortunately the finger constantly gets in the way so I have to move it.

I have an opposable thumb, so I just move my thumb off the screen when it's in the way.

It's like when I'm holding onto something; I just move my thumb off to let go.

Sorry to pile on here, but this is not a real problem for me and as someone who is 6'2" with hands to match, someone would seem to have to be really fat fingered for this to be an issue; plus tilt scrolling is worthless in one of the primary contexts I use my phone, which is mounted to my dashboard as a GPS/hands-free unit.

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]

I actually wouldn't buy the phone either: This phone is totally unappealing to a superuser, except for that one appealing feature.

There's a #%&! finger covering up the screen now!

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…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08xQLGWTSag

"A tribute to doing it wrong" That's classic. It could have just as easily been called "Over-acting Theater" or "Solutions for everything except ineptitude"

You might enjoy http://www.reddit.com/r/wheredidthesodago/

> 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.

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.

> 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!

Unless I'm wearing mittens, it's never been a problem in ~6 years of smartphone use.

Plus, fine motor skills seem easier with my fingers rather than my whole hand having to learn to tilt in increments. I find that mobile browsing (especially with smaller text on my phone) involves smaller, fine movements that I can't imagine doing by tilting.

Yes if that is a problem you probably need to rethink your app design.

Didn't Samsung already try to address the "finger issue" (which has never been a problem myself or anyone I know of complaining about) with their scrolling via eye tracking, which turned out to be a nothing more than a gimmicky battery slayer?

I hope it doesn't end up like playing balance a bubble to keep things from constantly sliding around. You think people's motion sickness from iOS7's parallax lock screen was something?

But I would love to see solid, intuitive improvements in UI like this.

This could be on par with the switch from resistive to capacitive touch screens.

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.

except this may not be either useful or disruptive. Perhaps Apple relegated it to a gimmick because they knew that tying something as fundamental as navigation to it would not work. Just think of all of the people who claimed they got sick from or were simply terribly annoyed by all of the motion in iOS7. Now imagine that this motion is the foundation of your device. Does not sound useful or disruptive to me.

I think Apple's face is blissfully smack-free after this particular announcement

I solved that using a Nexus One until now. it has a trackball. i can scroll content and click any button on the screen with not even smudging it.

but apparently only you and I care about not having a finger on top of what you are reading.

You tilt the screen to activate the alternate view and now you can't see it due to the angle of the sun.

Hopefully there is more to it than just using the cameras like a gyroscope. Because tilt to scrolling with just rotational information is already very possible.

I can honestly say that I have never once felt that my finger was getting in the way of using my phone.

i don't think finger-in-the-way is the problem. i think reaching for buttons one-handed is the real problem they're trying to solve. on my iphone when the back/forward button is at the top of the screen, i can't reach it.

I would like to see a phone with a wheel on the side for scrolling.