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.
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....
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.