
Review: Amazon’s Fire Phone - digital55
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/technology/personaltech/review-amazons-fire-phone.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMediaHigh&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
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r00fus
My question remains - why did Amazon go for the high-end price point? Amazon
has excelled previously by competing on price. While the Fire Phone is
competitively priced to the corresponding iPhone or Galaxy (esp. given the
freebies), it simply doesn't make up for the lack of Google Play or iOS
AppStore. And chained to AT&T?

Perhaps this is Amazon's stalking horse into the phone market.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
From afar it seems like the US market can't handle phones that cost less than
$600, so pricing at less than that has basically no effect on what the average
consumer pays.

~~~
chrisBob
In the US most people[1,2] get their phones on contract, and a $600 subsidy is
standard. If you plan to mostly forgo the prepaid market then US customers are
cost insensitive, and pricing a phone at less than $600 is giving money away
to the carriers. Similarly if a customer plans to stick with Verizon, Sprint
or AT&T then they are throwing away money if they don't use the "free" upgrade
on an expensive phone every chance they get.

My father-in-law recently realized that he had paid Verizon about $1200 extra
for his Samsung Alias 2, and promptly switched carriers to one where you start
saving money after 2 years.

[1]about 75M prepaid [http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-
finance/articles/2013...](http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-
finance/articles/2013/09/16/the-rise-of-no-contract-cellphones)

[2] out of 327M total
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use)

~~~
Lagged2Death
Getting us to call these usurious loans "subsidies" is probably the most
ingenious bit of underhanded marketing the cell carriers ever concocted.

I think you should generally be suspicious when a vendor tries to get you, the
customer, to use the vendor's own internal jargon. As a customer, I shouldn't
need to know your jargon; I don't give a shit about your internal policies and
terms. If you're encouraging me to speak your unnatural language, you're
probably trying to give me a false sense of security and savvy that makes it
easier to pick my pocket.

One sees similar moves in many complicated transactions like real estate,
automobile leases and purchases, etc.

~~~
VLM
"usurious loans"

Beyond the correct analysis of marketing-speak the market looks like contract
phones are basically a "worse than payday loan" interest rate of a couple
hundred bucks and couple year payback period. So you get a $500 phone at a
cost of maybe $2000 over the course of the loan. The MVNO resellers mostly
seem to go prepay, I know I paid $300 for my phone some time ago, but I only
pay $22 per month for voice and psuedo-unlimited data so I'm pretty happy.

It is interesting that Amazon is kinda in between, kinda a subprime loan
seller and kinda a phone service reseller, probably for financial reasons.

Amazon does seem to be financializing itself, they do push their credit card
every time I buy. It is no great modification to drift sideways into phone
loans.

In the long run I expect to see them continue to financialize themselves into
perhaps subprime car loans (outright buy Car Max or a competitor?) and
eventually home equity loans (to buy more stuff at Amazon) or home loans
(complete with prime membership to help fill your house with trinkets from
china)

So it makes sense as a grand strategy thing to move away from Amazon the book
retailer and into Amazon the bank. Nobody in America can make a living doing
anything but FIRE sector in the long run by intentional regulation, so they
kinda have to do this.

~~~
wlesieutre
What carrier is your $22 pseudo-unlimited data though? I'm looking at some
alternatives and T-Mobile's $30 unlimited seems like a decent bet. But $22 for
pseudo-unlimited would still be a step up from AT&T's 300 MB plan that I'm on.

~~~
seanflyon
I pay $25 a month for actually unlimited data and text and talk. Republic
Wireless can afford to do this because they are a wifi first provider meaning
that when I make calls at home or at work it goes over wifi costing them
nothing.

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dnewms
Mayday is truly a new level of customer service, and makes the phone a great
choice for those who might struggle with new technology -- like the remaining
population without a smartphone.

~~~
joelrunyon
If that's the target market - wouldn't a lower price point make more sense?

~~~
jkestner
People who don't yet have a smartphone have many reasons besides cost. Older
people who are reluctant to move from a true phone to a multimodal pocket
computer may be very happy with paying for one that has instant customer
support.

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davidw
I got one of the original Kindle Fire tablets. It's not bad, but without all
the Google stuff: gmail, maps, etc... it's just not as useful as my Nexus
tablet.

~~~
orkoden
No good maps is a reason not get this phone for me.

~~~
peatmoss
As someone with more than a passing familiarity with geospatial, I was excited
when Amazon announced their intention to work on their own maps product. IIRC,
it was to be OSM-backed, and presumably integrated into their AWS offerings. I
could see Amazon eventually creating a decent competitor to Google / Bing /
Apple. But then on the other hand, Google > Bing > Apple.

~~~
sytelus
Most people who are not in this field don't understand this but the reason
most new smartphones will fail is simply because there is simply no quality
options for maps available on those phones. Maps and local search is #2 or #3
most important thing on smartphones depending on which data you look at. If
Google ever wants to kill iPhone, all they have to do is pull the plug on
Google Maps app and slowly but steady users will floac off.

Unfortunately building high quality modern maps and local search that works
world wide (or even just US for that matter) is _extremely_ hard. Sure, you
can buy data from NavTeq, InfoUSA and likes but what you will get in return is
equivalent of MapQuest quality circa 2000. If you really want to build
something that is at Google or even Bing level, you will need far more data,
world class geocoding, rendering, partnerships from Yelp and likes, mining
images and things like open hours from web, freshness to make sure you don't
have closed businesses, huge staff to constantly fix and curate tail end, high
performance tool set, huge serve infrastructure and so on.

And that's just for the start. To actually compete with Google or Bing maps
you then need all other bells and whistles such as transit maps, walking
directions, elevation profiles, building polygons, bird eye view, street
views, information on construction, 95+% accurate turn-by-turn navigation
among many other minor details that you completely take for granted.

To accomplish this level of features and quality, you will need staff that
easily can could in couple of thousands and ability recruit the top talent in
many fields including maping, cartography, rendering, indexing, distributed
computing, machine learning, computer vision and so on. Even if you do get
managed to accumulate this talent, it will still take multiple years to boot
up and by that time your competition is already has moved on to next level.

~~~
peatmoss
I think you're completely right. For me, maps is absolutely the most important
feature of my phone, followed by texting, then web, then voice. Bing isn't a
bad runner-up to Google in a lot of ways, but it is clearly still a runner up.
That last quality hurdle requires a lot of foot soldiers on the ground
collecting data. Google has such a small army. Microsoft doesn't--at least not
at the scale Google does. Apple's release was a facepalm for several reasons,
not least of which was their omission of public transit routing. As an urban
planner, I was incensed enough to drop IOS as my last phone upgrade in favor
of Android.

Moreover, I would have liked for Apple to double down on open map data by
creating the software and supporting infrastructure to collect geospatial data
from all those portable, network-connected sensors they keep selling. I'd have
put up with an inferior Apple map product if I could rationalize it in terms
of them helping build OSM up.

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caster_cp
Very good review, though I would only argue on one point. The author says it's
unfortunate that Amazon heavily promoted the phone's most "out-there"
features, while it really excels on usability and friendliness to the user.
For me, this is easy to understand: the technical crowd that went to Bezo's
presentation would be very disapointed if the phone's biggest feature was a
customer support system.

The fact is: this phone is really not for us, the tech-savvy hackernews
reading crowd. To the best of my knowledge, this is one of the first biggest
tech introduction that only has real value to the "regular" folks that came
out of the silicon valley culture (ok, ok, Amazon is not a silicon valley
company, but it's as if it were). If I'm wrong and there are products aimed
_mainly_ at "regular non-tech folks" that came out of sillicon valley, please
correct me.

I am really curious as to how this will unfold. As I see it, most of sillicon
valley innovations followed the normal adoption curve: go for the innovators,
then expand your market until you hit critical mass. Some were slower
(Dropbox), some faster (IPhone), but they all had a very big feature aimed at
the tech savvy as well. This is why I think Firefly may be a good thing, it's
the bait for the tech people to adopt it and then, hopefuly, it will trickle
down to the moms and pops out there. Honestly, then, I think of it mainly as a
curiosity than something I would spend $600 bucks to have.

~~~
matznerd
I agree that this phone is for the average person, it is also a V1. One
advantage that Amazon has over the competitors is their abilities to directly
market to the millions of users they have on Amazon.com daily. Think about how
successful the kindle became, purely being sold on Amazon.com and being the
first thing you saw whenever you went to the homepage. Now the first thing I
see when I load Amazon is an ad for the phone...
[http://cl.ly/image/3i0c3f0C1f1u/Image%202014-07-23%20at%209....](http://cl.ly/image/3i0c3f0C1f1u/Image%202014-07-23%20at%209.45.57%20AM.png)

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rayiner
The ArsTechnica review is far superior:
[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/review-amazons-
fire-p...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/review-amazons-fire-phone-
offers-new-gimmicks-old-platform-growing-pains).

The bottom line:

> But the bigger question for most people isn't going to be "does this phone
> do anything useful"; it's "should I buy this phone rather than some other
> competing phone?" For the time being, the answer is no.

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programminggeek
Amazon pretty much nailed the first iteration of the Fire Phone as much as
they could for v1. It got the price point, features, and quality right.

It would be really easy for them to just hire LG or HTC to make an existing
phone with an Amazon logo and call it a day, but they took their time to make
their own thing.

Smart.

~~~
autokad
judging from the overwhelmingly negative reaction to its price point, the
evidence strongly suggests they got the price point wrong. at least until
sales can be the final judge.

this is how their value proposition sounds to ME: I have less functionality
than other phones, so I'm easier to use, but you still have to pay just as
much for me as all the other more well endowed phones. but dont worry, theres
some things i offer that you don't care about that actually makes me a small
bit cheaper

however, I am certainly not like most other smart phone users. i will say
this, people tend to not want to pay for customer service. someone who is
intimidated by smart phones doesnt want someone easily available to tell them
how to use it, they just want it to be easy to use.

~~~
programminggeek
If they priced it cheap, there isn't much benefit to them. At $400, it becomes
a "free" phone, which means it's less valuable and not comparable to iPhone or
Galaxy S.

Most people they are selling to don't buy their phone for real price, so what
you're really talking about is up to $200 difference. If they priced it less
than $400, they'd lose money in the subsidy and AT&T basically would make
money on the deal.

At the end of the day the consumer isn't going to see it as a super expensive
smartphone. They're going to see it as costing the same as the iPhone or
Galaxy S.

Nobody says the iPhone or Galaxy S are too expensive.

~~~
personZ
Lots of people say the iPhone 5s or Galaxy S5 are too expensive, especially
those people who want to upgrade mid-term, or who accidentally broke their
device, or who are buying for children or others. Or who want a less expensive
plan.

And as carriers start to prioritize or even promote bring-your-own plans (and
make the actual cost more obvious), I suspect we're going to see a greatly
increasing interest in lower cost devices. This is already happening as we
move from smartphones being some sort of status symbol, to being tools.

There is a kind of disconcerting elitism that appears in many discussions
about smartphones and the smartphone market - one where we all need to pretend
that money is no object, and we're all super rich and careless with our money
(two traits, as an aside, that are usually in absolute competition with each
other). Reality doesn't mirror that at all. Indeed, it's in stark contrast
with the release of this very phone which has overwhelmingly been met with
criticism that it is far too expensive (many thought it would be $0 on a
standard plan, or even on a reduced rate plan).

------
VLM
"The interface constantly sorts your apps according to how recently you’ve
used them. This let me navigate my phone very efficiently, often saving me
from getting lost in a sea of apps"

How does this work as a UI? I'm not a UI guy but I know a bad fad when I see
one. Superficially, a big scrollable 2-d grid in alphabetical order makes life
pretty easy as long as marketing doesn't rename apps too often. A random 1-d
line sounds really hard to use.

As a use case example, I'm about to press the "add comment" button thats
always aligned with the left and bottom edge of this bright background
textbox, its very easy to find, repeatable (which is comforting and
convenient) and fairly intuitive. Yet if you took every window decoration
widget on my entire desktop and put them on a rotating ribbon in random order,
it would probably take 5 minutes, every time I interact with it, to find and
click "add comment".

I've seen this fad UI trend on other mobile apps, I find it a huge PITA and
impediment to my enjoyment of the afflicted apps. 5 seconds of "oh hey, cool,
flicks finger" followed by an eternity of "this sucks"

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AndrewKemendo
>I called up Mayday four times to pepper its agents with questions. In every
case, a person popped up on the screen in under 10 seconds.

So a personal assistant just for your phone. That sounds like a fantastic
feature. Is it something that can be sustained long term though without paying
for it specifically?

I guess that question applies to Amazon generally too though, so I guess the
answer is "I guess we will see."

~~~
smackfu
It's been around on their Fire tablets since September 2013.

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scythe
Something tells me that Dynamic Perspective, as implemented on the Fire phone,
might not have been an entirely awful experience to implement. A couple of
points:

* Amazon isn't known for wasting time or money. They wouldn't have delayed the release of their first-ever phone for an expensive gimmick. Sticking a cheap gimmick on within time requirements is doable.

* 3D rendering is, well, a solved problem. Accelerometers have been incorporated into phone UIs for more than five years. Even facial detection is in most modern digital cameras. Tying these things together doesn't require sending a whole lot of information back and forth -- you just update a couple of vectors representing estimates of phone location and head location.

I wouldn't be too surprised, given Amazon's track record, to find that Dynamic
Perspective started as kind of a "why not?". If people can make cool things
out of it, they'll keep it: it might be partially a trick to get developers to
target the device, and to make interesting things out of it. If not, it won't
be missed.

~~~
gambiting
>>Even facial detection is in most modern digital cameras. Tying these things
together doesn't require sending a whole lot of information back and forth --
you just update a couple of vectors representing estimates of phone location
and head location.

The problem is, that it's just not good enough. Even the Kinect 2, which from
a developers perspective is a fantastic tool and I have never seen anything as
good as it when it comes to full body tracking, it also sometimes messes up.
And as a customer, I don't want gadgets in my phone that work 90% of the time.
If I want to use the Dynamic Perspective and it works 9/10 times, it's just
not good enough - I would rather turn it off.

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TorKlingberg
It may be a problem for Amazon that they lack the global presence that their
competitors in the phone market have. Amazon is big in the US, UK, Germany and
Japan, but not in rest of the world.

~~~
seanflyon
That is an awfully big portion of the $600 phone market.

