Poll: Are you moving to the Amazon Fire Phone? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Are you moving to the Amazon Fire Phone?

23 pointszengr58 comments

Are you going to move away from your current phone (iOS, Windows, Android, others) to Amazon Fire Phone?

No. I like Nexus phones running stock Android, or phones with good, cheap, solid hardware that can easily be rooted and made to run a custom ROM.

The Fire Phone is neither; out of the box it's about as far away from the Nexus experience as it's possible to get, and even if it's easy to ROM it, the price they're charging makes that impractical. The Fire Phone will live and die by their ability to find a receptive audience for their weird features; I'm not in that group.

No. I'm moving away from smartphones entirely. The negative impact on my life is higher than the advantages.

I find google calendar, navigator, and evernote in my pocket more productive than not having them.

Here is the tip, you can disable anything you consider unproductive in the smartphone.

I find them terribly constricting. If you don't conform to the constraints that are forced upon you by the ecosystem and the device then you are at the mercy of the ecosystem and the device and this is nothing but bad news when you hit a problem or need to do something free-form.

I too used Google Calendar, but it's terribly complicated to enter an event in on an Android device accurately, the web interface is clunky and the sync isn't reliable if you're in a poor reception area. Same with evernote and any notetaking software (google keep as well). It's impossible to take notes on the fly quickly without observing the device otherwise you end up listing garbage and missing the stuff going on in front of you. Then occasionally you might find a picture says a thousand words - which you're instantly stuffed with. Your focus is 80% on the machine and 20% on the problem when notetaking on a computer of any description.

I carry a little notebook (3 for £1 in Tiger here in the UK) and a mechanical pencil (doesn't need sharpening and has a rubber - Rotring Tikky box of 10 for £11.99 on ebay) for notetaking.

As for scheduling, I know what is when (don't underestimate the power of thinking about this rather than contracting it out) and for navigation, I'll scribble out a diagram before I leave of where I'm going. Gotta use that geography GCSE for something.

And no you can't disable everything unproductive on a smartphone. I tried it and my device slowly switched all the features back on again. I decided that the following process should apply:

1. Start with what you need.

2. Add what you want.

Point 1 turned out to be a dumbphone (calls and SMS) and 2 never materialised.

Including the large screen and short battery life?

Hah, I did the same :) While I still have some phones lying around for dev, I personally use an old Nokia dumbphone. No distractions anymore, plus nearly 4 weeks without need of a recharge!

Yep Nokia C2-01 here.

I don't get 4 weeks (people keep phoning me still) but I'm managine 7-9 days which is better than 7-9 hours!

Couldn't just turn off all the pointless attention eating notifications and enjoy the useful features?

On a similar note, I started removing apps which made me waste my time. Facebook was one of those apps for me.

Yeah I removed everything and I ended up with the same feature set as a Nokia C2-01 so I bought one.

The only two things I missed (for a bit) was:

1. Email. Turns out people don't have to be replied to instantly and they accept that after a bit.

2. Music. Turns out the C2-01 does a rather good job of this as well after I realised it and stuffed a 4Gb Micro SD in it.

I solved this issue by never unmuting my phone. Not even for phone calls (unless im expecting an important call). My phone doesn't tell me when to use it. I do it the other way around. I check my phone maybe 2-3 times a day. When I wake up. Once a little after lunch. And once at night.

The main thing you have to do is not feel like its your job to immediatly attend to any contact. Treat your phone like a laptop. Emails you should reapond to in 24 hours. Text or phone calls don't need to be answered. Your phone saves your call logs for your convenience. Just get back to that person when you have a free chance. Our ancestors survived not being able to talk to any one at any moment. We don't have to either.

I've been doing this for a while and, while it infuriates some people, I've found it to be very freeing. Mailbox is a great way of dealing with email, and Do Not Disturb lets me allow certain important calls through if I need to. I enjoy the feeling of being in control of my phone, rather than at its mercy!

$649 for a phone with a smaller, lower-resolution screen, an nonstandard fork of Android 4.2, and a fancy sensor gimmick. Definitely not.

No, thank you.

I will never use a gatekeeper to access Internet.

For me Internet should be a network, not a top down centralized service.

Amazon Silk means every single page that you visit is registered by an American company and obviously the NSA.

At least when I use a conventional browser, they have to work harder to spy on me.

Interesting - I know nothing about Silk; does it proxy through Amazon servers or similar? If so, yet another reason to never touch this phone.

Edit: Even worse, it actually outright renders the page on Amazon's servers. All the privacy violation of proxying with bonus MITM on TLS connections.

Yup, you are right: "To minimize latency and page load times, Amazon Silk routes requests through remote proxy servers powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. These cloud servers provide high-performance connection speeds and computing power not normally available to a mobile form factor."

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/silk/latest/developerguide/introd...

At least on the Kindle Fire tablets, it is possible to disable the proxy.

I find any decent phone as good as the next one, all of them offering the handful of features and apps I really use.

Which makes my choice of phone more a matter of "lifestyle accessory", and being a sucker for great design, the Fire Phone just seems very plain and "meh" to me.

I wish I could find a poll like this for the iPhone in 2007.

It had no carrier subsidies, so was mega expensive. It had no app store, so totally pre the "theres an app for that" phenomena.

Corporate IT departments were unfriendly to it.

And it didn't offer 3G!

Now, I know Apple was able to get away with that because it was inventing the whole category. And that no company, not Apple, nobody, will have the same grace period. (Ask the Palm Pre about that). But I can certainly see some killer UI experiences and awesome integration with Amazon. And honestly I think my wife would consider switching solely for the free photo storage.

Because paying $700 for the privilege of being able to buy more stuff from amazon is really awesome, right?

I don't use any such services, but I know google give a lot of free storage. Apple give some too, as do Microsoft, even...

Given the number of yeses - currently zero versus 131 noes - Amazon hopefully has a different target market in mind.

Given the spec of it, people with more money than sense, but apple already has that market cornered with the iPhone...

Relevant is what people do, not what they say … so let's wait for facts.

No.

I am going to move to Mozilla and Linux for as much as I can.

My sister gave me her old iPhone (a lovely gift!) and I find it somewhat frustrating to use.

I'm not sure I trust Amazon to have my telephony information.

Also (and I sY this every time I comment in any Amazon thread in the hope that someone sees it and does something about it) Amazon search is hopelessly broken. Often I abandon a search and go somewhere else to buy stuff because sorting and filtering just doesn't work. I am amazed that someone in search hasn't targetted this. Perhaps Algoli can get this?

Amazon Fire Phone is Android, just without gapps. I don't quite get the point of this poll tbh.

I bought the Kindle Fire HD tablet as an experiment a few years back, and found it almost useless for my daily tasks. It was OK for watching movies and reading books, but none of the productivity stuff I wanted from an android device was there.

Stock Gmail app on android is much better integrated with Gmail than a bare-bones IMAP client (multiple accounts nicely recognised, different sync policies for labels etc), I missed the nice Google calendar integration etc.

My business pretty much runs on google apps, so for that use case there is a huge difference between something running android and something running well integrated google services. I assumed getting google apps on Fire would be just a matter of installing, but it would require rooting the device and rebuilding the OS from scratch, which I didn't want to waste time on. I assume Fire phone will have the same issue.

It is Android, but Android without Google services is pretty much pointless for me.

It's a fork of Android with major differences and no compatibility with Google Services (which to many people is one of the defining characteristics of Android).

So you are technically correct but not in a particularly interesting way.

These days not having gapps will break a surprising number of apps. I know this because I run cyanogenmod without gapps.

I'll have to see it before I totally write it off, but the 3D stuff reminds me of the hype around Nintendo's 3D stuff. Yeah, it was cool, looks great, etc, but ultimately not seamless enough to warrant actually using it long term. And then for the rest of it, it's like picking an Amazon tablet over a regular one, I don't want to be locked into their app store, etc.

I own a Kindle Fire HDX, which is a nice tablet, but really the only reason I own it instead of a regular Android tablet is because Amazon Video is not available on Android. Given that I don't care about video for a tiny phone screen, my answer is a definitive no.

The dynamic perspective feature seems like weird UI gimmick. I don't really like head tracking features. I turned that off in my Galaxy S5.

Taking a picture of a product is a cool idea, but there's no reason they can't also put that on other phones.

Also Amazon never updates their hardware to new versions of the software. I owned the original Kindle Fire and it never got any of the HD or HDX software changes, nothing. Nobody has beaten Apple in this regard, but Android isn't as bad as Amazon's forked version.

Finally, the Amazon app store is kind of a desert.

I just don't get what they were thinking with this thing. It seems dead on arrival.

I'd buy it for $200 unlocked.

$649 is ridiculous. So is the concept of locking.

how much do you think other high-end smartphones actually cost?

iphone 5s 32GB: $US749 samsung galaxy s5: ~$us800 etc

The Kindle Fire is generally thought of as a mid range smartphone.

Comparing to other mid range smartphones:

- Moto E is $150: http://observationdeck.io9.com/moto-e-review-1594224578

- Moto G is $196: http://www.engadget.com/products/motorola/moto/g/

- Nexus 5 was $349 but has dropped: http://www.theverge.com/products/nexus-5/7422

Amazon typically operate on low margins. The Kindle Fire is designed to sell Amazon services. A loss leader based on followup purchases ala xbox wouldn't be entirely unheard of.

We're probably the last population targeted by this phone. It probably targets seniors or heavy prime users.

Heavy prime users? But why? They are already locked in their ecommerce system. I am sure try are not trying to compete with apple or samsung but want to increase the adoption of amazon.com. Which means they want non prime users to use this phone.

Like the author says ,it's a pretty forced explanation, but just to get more money out of them, the excel table shows how much:

http://stratechery.com/2014/amazons-whale-strategy/

Nope.

Looks horrendously expensive and only has average specs, significantly worse than the S5 which will probably be my next phone, and it doesn't have CyanogenMod support, an SD card, or a removable battery; not to mention that as it's amazon it's probably locked down to fuck and exists to sell worthless 'cloud'... I'd rather buy an HTC phone than that, which has all those drawbacks but can still have CyanogenMod installed on it, plus isn't funding Amazon...

Oh, and apparently it doesn't have the play store, so it running android is essentially worthless, especially if amazon disabled apk installation in the process of locking you into their services. Fire Phone has to be called that because if you try it, you'll get burnt.

No because Amazon is a company I never want to have anything to do with.

As opposed to the individuals who produce every other phone? Terrible reasoning, every phone is made by a company.

Apple, Microsoft, and Google are hardly paragons of ethical behaviour, sure, but they also aren't Amazon. Not to mention that at least with Android you can install your own ROM, which can be google-free if you want.

If the Amazon phone follows their Kindle line we will see the price rapidly reduce throughout the year, so I'll be interested to see how that changes the poll. Wouldn't change my opinion. I bought a Kindle Fire gen 1 and ended up hardly using it compared to my iPads, so I'm not very curious about the phone, but still interested in how it will affect other people's opinions.

I think the question is whether they are able to position themselves in a way that people can recognize a real additional value. "For normal smart phone stuff I would use my Android phone. But I really also want to do X and that is something only Amazon does well." I don't think they can provide a real USP that can't be copied by the Android and Apple guys fast, though.

No. Because my iPhone helps me to be productive. It's not a shopping cart (there's an app for that should I wish).

No. Why on earth would i want NSA and other spygates to watch me 24x7 with 4 cameras (even in night!) #CrazyStuffs!

This phone is not actually made by the NSA, it's made by Amazon. The NSA doesn't make consumer facing hardware. If you are worried about Amazon being legally obligated to hand over your private information from your phone you would have that same worry with any other private smartphone vendor.

I have never heard of smartphone cameras being used to spy on people 24/7 either.

Yes. This is not made by NSA and i'm not saying that this is made for NSA. But ultimately the bigData is going to go there.

And i don't worry about Apple because they don't have to find what books i like and when i need an Air cooler, but Amazon needs those information. Either me, never heard of such smartphones tracking user's head and face everytime - so precisely.

Of course you've never heard of it, they're being "innovative". They need something to differentiate their product from every other phone on the market.

No. Can't do AT&T (hate them). Can't do Android without the play store (no apps).

I'll be waiting to see if any of the exclusive stuff is more than a gimmick, or if it's actually useful.

And then waiting to see when it's available in the UK.

No 1. got 4 inchi,7 inchi ,14 inchi..just for development. i think other programmer like me. buy for development testing.

No. I don't see why I should move to it.

It is targeted at (potential) Amazon Prime customers. Of which I am not one.

Yes, it looks beautiful and I love the UI.

No. I'm not trading the Apple ecosystem for a mere "device". Regardless if it has any slight technical advantages.

No.

don't want to use att

Yes. I work for Amazon.

Is that because you'll get it for free?

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