Review: Amazon’s Fire Phone offers new gimmicks, old platform growing pains

Firefly, Dynamic Perspective are great ideas that can't close the ecosystem gap.

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[Marcos2247]

SalmanThaw[/url]":621zgkt9]the battle for 3rd OS is heating up nicely.

I don't know if I would call a restricted, Amazon-centric Android fork a 3rd OS.

 

[Zaitt]

SalmanThaw[/url]":2g2ukrj1]Like the Premier League's battle for 4th spot, the battle for 3rd OS is heating up nicely. Game on.

1 Carrier, 1 Country, $200 on contract. Sounds like a huge threat.

 

[Silellak]

Amazon's best tweak to basic navigation is the addition of gestures that correspond to each edge swipe. Tilt the phone's left side toward you to pull up the left panel, and tilt the phone the other way to dismiss it. Tilt the right side toward you to do the same thing with the right panel. Do a little swivel thing with your wrist and the notification center appears and disappears. You need to be precise and deliberate with these motions—Amazon doesn't want people to be invoking menus by accident all the time—but once you get the hang of the motions they can save your other hand some trips to the screen.

Really? I watched The Verge's video review of the phone, and watching the reviewer flick the phone to the left and right to do basic UI things like “show a menu” was fucking painful. Did any decent UX designer even try and use this phone prior to release? This reeks of someone high-up having a single-minded obsession with a bad idea and using their position to drive that idea to market regardless of how many people told them not to. I don't see how "saving your hand some trips to the screen" is really worth it when the alternative is "tilt your phone in stupid ways", especially when my hand is still going to presumably have to "make a trip to the screen" so that I can, you know, select one of the options I just revealed.

At least the people (who I have to assume exist) that said “no, no, dear God, no this is stupid, please stop” get the dark satisfaction of watching this thing crash and burn in a marketplace full of much better phones with much better ideas.

 

[JPan]

600$ price tag. Amazon has gotten insane. Why would I buy a machine with the sole purpose of making buying stuff on Amazon easier and pay the same price for it as for a non-gimped product. Someone in Seattle went completely chu chu on this one. Price drop incoming to clear the warehouse.

 

[colin1497]

We own 3 Kindle Fires, which work OK for their intended purposes, but Amazon's unwillingness to support last year's hardware with feature updates makes me wholly unwilling to find them trustworthy enough to buy this phone. 3 years of Kindle Fires, and not a single one has had its OS updated when the next year's version comes out. None of our devices runs the same OS, though they all share a common SoC vendor and 2 of them are very similar hardware.

The 2nd generation 7" Fire HD is the same SoC and much of the same hardware as the 8.9" Fire HD, but the new 7" Fire HD 2nd gen has the newer Fire OS 3.x based on Android 4.2.2 that's on the Fire HDX, while the prior year's 8.9" fire is stuck with an antiquated version based on 4.0.3.

For a $200 tablet for my son, I can accept this. For my primary phone? Not a chance. Until Amazon takes steps to prove to me that they will support hardware they aren't in this ballgame at any price.

 

[thomsirveaux]

Silellak[/url]":3c53i54i]

Amazon's best tweak to basic navigation is the addition of gestures that correspond to each edge swipe. Tilt the phone's left side toward you to pull up the left panel, and tilt the phone the other way to dismiss it. Tilt the right side toward you to do the same thing with the right panel. Do a little swivel thing with your wrist and the notification center appears and disappears. You need to be precise and deliberate with these motions—Amazon doesn't want people to be invoking menus by accident all the time—but once you get the hang of the motions they can save your other hand some trips to the screen.

Really? I watched The Verge's video review of the phone, and watching the reviewer flick the phone to the left and right to do basic UI things like “show a menu” was fucking painful. Did any decent UX designer even try and use this phone prior to release? This reeks of someone high-up having a single-minded obsession with a bad idea and using their position to drive that idea to market regardless of how many people told them not to. I don't see how "saving your hand some trips to the screen" is really worth it when the alternative is "tilt your phone in stupid ways", especially when my hand is still going to presumably have to "make a trip to the screen" so that I can, you know, select one of the options I just revealed.

At least the people (who I have to assume exist) that said “no, no, dear God, no this is stupid, please stop” get the dark satisfaction of watching this thing crash and burn in a marketplace full of much better phones with much better ideas.

I dunno, I thought it was ok. In any case it's totally optional.

 

[SalmanThaw]

Marcos2247[/url]":2loq92rj]

SalmanThaw[/url]":2loq92rj]the battle for 3rd OS is heating up nicely.

I don't know if I would call a restricted, Amazon-centric Android fork a 3rd OS.

Think of Google Android and Amazon Android as Manchester United and Manchester City...

But in all seriousness, at what point is a fork considered its own OS? What is the differentiator? Think Ubuntu/Mint/Debian...

I think the average consumer will group phones into iOS, Android, WP and Fire OS.... or I think that's how the carriers will group them... I don't think they would group it with the Google Androids because heaven forbid some teen can't find Yo or the Kardashian app on the store.

I think Google is pressing the OHA manufacturers to boot with the same Android logo and everything, to dress like a team, basically. So I think the Android forks will stand out.

 

[Snarky Robot]

The integrated store is useful...

but...

Google's had Goggles for ages.

Hell, Microsoft has had Bing Vision as a lens for Windows Phone for a while too. Microsoft's will even scan for text, do some OCR magic and transcribe what it sees in another language.

I have had multiple generations of Kindles. I'm a happy member of Amazon Prime. But I see ZERO usefulness for this phone in my life.

Seriously, Amazon could have done a "Firefly" camera app for Windows Phone and Android and been done with it. It's not a bad feature, when it works well it's like magic. It's just magic we've seen before, so it doesn't really justify it's own hardware.

 

[Chemical Tribe]

What person thought a carousel interface was a good idea to mix up with swipe menus on the left and right, plus an app drawer? The carousel is annoying enough on the Nook.

The 3d perspective is pretty much ridiculous when everything else is so whacked. Maybe that's how fireOS is supposed to look like but the main menus are dark, while email and others are bright white and colored.

And then there is less freedom by restricting user keyboards and launchers (which of course can't be changed otherwise what's the point of selling an Amazon phone). Even apple is letting 3rd party keyboards soon. The nook also allowed a third party launcher.

 

[gwenkhan]

Amazon is pulling a Microsoft here: incredibly cool technology that I just... don't need. Maybe it's something in the water in Seattle?

 

[Rdrr]

I'd really like to pick one up to try it out, as the vast majority of my phone usage aside from email, phone calls and web browsing is amazon related (kindle and audible). The $649 price point is way too high given the tradeoffs even if I don't use them daily.

 

[Silellak]

Operative Me[/url]":1ch500xc]The integrated store is useful...

but...

Google's had Goggles for ages.

Hell, Microsoft has had Bing Vision as a lens for Windows Phone for a while too. Microsoft's will even scan for text, do some OCR magic and transcribe what it sees in another language.

I have had multiple generations of Kindles. I'm a happy member of Amazon Prime. But I see ZERO usefulness for this phone in my life.

Seriously, Amazon could have done a "Firefly" camera app for Windows Phone and Android and been done with it. It's not a bad feature, when it works well it's like magic. It's just magic we've seen before, so it doesn't really justify it's own hardware.

Fun fact: If you have the Amazon app on your phone, you have "Firefly" - at least sort of. Open up the app, tap the search field, tap "Flow", point the camera, and watch the little "Fireflies" appear. It's not as powerful, of course, but the basics are there.

 

[Silellak]

Rdrr[/url]":3gda3l3b]I'd really like to pick one up to try it out, as the vast majority of my phone usage aside from email, phone calls and web browsing is amazon related (kindle and audible). The $649 price point is way too high given the tradeoffs even if I don't use them daily.

Which just goes to show that Amazon missed the boat entirely. This should've been a free-or-almost-free-with-Prime device, not an iPhone-priced device.

 

[SalmanThaw]

Zaitt[/url]":2pjphux3]

SalmanThaw[/url]":2pjphux3]Like the Premier League's battle for 4th spot, the battle for 3rd OS is heating up nicely. Game on.

1 Carrier, 1 Country, $200 on contract. Sounds like a huge threat.

It's exactly like the Premier League! There are times in the season where the teams seem to not want 4th spot, trying hard to avoid it.

Amazon is trying a different angle from the phone ODMs. They are not a phone manufacturer that went into tablets and HTPCs. They are an entertainment service/online bookstore that is going into phones. If HTC were to make an HTPC, we'd think of it as a phone maker making a mini computer, which is a bit strange. When Amazon did it, it didn't feel strange at all. They're doing or heading for the convergence, One-OS thing without talking about it, but that seems to be the point. I think the next logical step for Amazon is wearables and tying the whole thing together...

Microsoft makes a huge fuss about it, but doesn't deliver and keeps delaying. (As of now, there are no advantages to having an XBox, WP and Surface that I know of... even though the last two are great devices), but Amazon goes another route and they seem to be heading in that direction too.

If Amazon and Microsoft were to leverage* the power of their cloud resources to their advantage, that would seal third spot. (* Sorry for using a buzzword, I'm drawing a blank)

By leverage I mean bribe. Give devs cloud resources for making exclusive apps on their platforms. If Azure were free to WP developers and AWS to Fire OS, then we'd see more developers writing apps for the platforms. They can charge them the day they stop exclusivity.

But then again, people hate these two companies. Microsoft will be blamed for "buying" apps, like paying for sex, and will be blasted when they start charging devs who don't want exclusivity anymore, that they're hold them hostage to WP or "threaten to kick them off" (if they don't pay their bill.)

It actually sounds like a PR nightmare...

 

[maxwell]

I want the firefly thingy. Really, really, want. I take pictures of books and things all the time and then they get lost in
the photo gallery. (Shazam covers music very well already).

Thanks to this thread, I'll try Googles and the Amazon app to see how well they work because $649. Ouch.

On a side note doesn't Blackberry also support the amazon app store now?

 

[Deleted member 192806]

Though Amazon has accounted for most of the essentials (this isn't some device that's launching with no e-mail client or something), the Fire Phone lacks a few basic, expected features that are available on much cheaper handsets from other manufacturers. The built-in personal assistant is capable only of basic messaging, e-mailing, and calling, and it relies heavily on Web searches for answers to basic questions like "what year is it" and "who is the President." The voice recognition is pretty good; it just can't do much—Siri, Google Now, and Cortana are all easily superior.

Should have paired with Wolfram Alpha.

 

[Silellak]

maxwell[/url]"z0hnkqu]I want the firefly thingy. Really, really, want. I take pictures of books and things all the time and then they get lost in
the photo gallery

This is mostly what I use Google Keep for, actually - visual notes.

 

[pokrface]

Silellak[/url]":hslo127o]Really? I watched The Verge's video review of the phone, and watching the reviewer flick the phone to the left and right to do basic UI things like “show a menu” was fucking painful.

Andrew does that a couple of times in our own video—right in the middle of page 1—and it doesn't seem too bad.

 

[bdp]

Glass back on a phone: why?

Seriously, I have never heard even a decent reason why putting glass on the back of a phone has any advantage at all over plastic or metal. My wife shattered the back of her Nexus 4 with a drop that might have slightly scratched the plastic back of my Galaxy Nexus.

Is it symetry? Do the designers feel like they need to make the back like the front, even though we spend all of our time interacting with the front of the phone? I JUST DON'T GET IT.

 

[arkiel]

Life in the Cunningham house: "he got a new phone to review! It be sushi times now!"

 

[DavidinAla]

It seems like a decent device. There's nothing wrong with it, really. But I see no advantage that matters that would cause anyone to buy this over an iPhone or one of the many Android phones. In that way, it's a lot like a BlackBerry or Windows Phone. That is, it's a decent device, but there's no reason to go with it over the more established alternatives. It seems like a tough sell to me.

 

[thomsirveaux]

arkiel[/url]":3gbvr2j2]Life in the Cunningham house: "he got a new phone to review! It be sushi times now!"

No joke, sometimes if I have to grind on something through the weekend I'll try to plan date nights that just happen to take me to photogenic places/things. My fiancée is a pretty good sport.

 

[Sajuuk]

All other things aside, the actual app ecosystem on Amazon is just...terrible, on average, anyway. If you could sideload and run the actual play store this might be a solid phone, but then you realize it's still $200, on contract

 

[Wisetrader]

I approve of the author's choice of books.

 

[JPan]

SalmanThaw[/url]"mn79ocq]I'm not sure why people down-voted my first comment. Because I called for competition in the market? Because I mentioned an unpopular sport? Or because I called Fire OS "an OS"? Or because I called Amazon a competitor to WP, which is deemed offensive to the 3-percenters? Or people just like downvoting?

~shrugs~

Perhaps they somehow predicted that you are one of those whiners that complain about being downvoted?

People down vote comments they do not like even if it's not rude trollish or obviously wrong. That is what happens if you give someone a thumbs up and down. Deal with it. (to lazy to search for a gif with the glasses)

 

[thomsirveaux]

pkirvan[/url]":gz9txwyv]

Andrew Cunningham[/url]":gz9txwyv]
The irritating blue backlight bleeding present on the Kindle Fire HDX is absent here

Funny you should write that Andrew. That's a real departure from Ars' previous attempts to make excuses for blue bleeding screens so long as they are running Android. I always thought that previous piece was awfully biased. If Apple released a screen where the backlight deviated in color by even 1% across the screen you'd write it up like the biggest scandal of the century, but when Amazon makes a product with a blue halo you're cool with that. Glad you've come to your senses.

I think that post is a great technical explainer about *why* the screen is the way it is, but I don't think we should have given Amazon a pass for it. Lots of different opinions about things with our staff, and we don't always agree on everything.

 

[locater16]

Firefly sounds like a less ambitious version of Microsoft's own visual AI tech. Though of course this is out and MS just continually teases its shit.

Regardless, the problem with "Firephone" is that frankly phones are interchangeable today. IOS, Windows Phone, Android, whatever. Unless you're "fanboy" you're best off going in for hardware, and for the price this doesn't have it unless you really, really, REALLY want max battery life.

 

[kennedye]

Media playback controls don't appear on the lock screen, so you have to unlock the phone and dive into the app to pause or skip tracks (this is the case whether you're using the integrated Amazon Music app or a third-party service like Spotify).

:facepalm:

 

[althaz]

locater16[/url]":10a9wjv5]Firefly sounds like a less ambitious version of Microsoft's own visual AI tech. Though of course this is out and MS just continually teases its shit.

Regardless, the problem with "Firephone" is that frankly phones are interchangeable today. IOS, Windows Phone, Android, whatever. Unless you're "fanboy" you're best off going in for hardware, and for the price this doesn't have it unless you really, really, REALLY want max battery life.

I'm pretty sure there's a bit more to it - app selection for instance and perhaps brand recognition? Otherwise Samsung would be out of business and Microsoft wouldn't have been able to afford their purchase of Nokia.

 

[charleski]

I can't believe no-one's yet said they'll be waiting for the Fire Sale...
Or is that one played out already?

 

[Ruefus]

Silellak[/url]":20it8g66]

maxwell[/url]":20it8g66]I want the firefly thingy. Really, really, want. I take pictures of books and things all the time and then they get lost in
the photo gallery

This is mostly what I use Google Keep for, actually - visual notes.

Until Google sunsets it.

(I know, I know....totally OT, but had to say it.)

 

[Upsilon1]

SalmanThaw[/url]":g9qe08ni]I'm not sure why people down-voted my first comment. Because I called for competition in the market? Because I mentioned an unpopular sport? Or because I called Fire OS "an OS"? Or because I called Amazon a competitor to WP, which is deemed offensive to the 3-percenters? Or people just like downvoting?

~shrugs~

I doubt you were downvoted for calling for more competition.

Talking just on why I downvoted you...
Soccer is far popular than another other sports in terms of countries it been played as a major sport.

Fire OS is not a another OS.....it is still Android. Manchester United and Manchester City are two different teams in the EPL. Barcelona and Espanyol are two different teams in the La Liga as well. Not a variant of the same team.

Competitor to Windows phone it is not.....Fire phone is only available in USA, on ONE carrier(AT&T), for $200 on contract or $650 without a contract. Americans hardly buy phones out of contract. How do you expect the fire phone to compete with windows phone devices that costs within $65 -$650 in market share?

 

[Eponymous Coward]

Silellak[/url]":kr4xknvr]

Rdrr[/url]":kr4xknvr]I'd really like to pick one up to try it out, as the vast majority of my phone usage aside from email, phone calls and web browsing is amazon related (kindle and audible). The $649 price point is way too high given the tradeoffs even if I don't use them daily.

Which just goes to show that Amazon missed the boat entirely. This should've been a free-or-almost-free-with-Prime device, not an iPhone-priced device.

I'm kind of surprised that the discount-with-contract gimmick isn't used here, but with the contract being with Amazon Prime, not the carrier. This way Amazon could leverage the "no carrier contract" concept yet tie users to a contract with Amazon Prime.

 

[kupfernigk]

SalmanThaw[/url]":3jgz18p5]

Marcos2247[/url]":3jgz18p5]

SalmanThaw[/url]":3jgz18p5]the battle for 3rd OS is heating up nicely.

I don't know if I would call a restricted, Amazon-centric Android fork a 3rd OS.

Think of Google Android and Amazon Android as Manchester United and Manchester City...

You mean foreign owned, based somewhere nobody in their right minds wants to live, and their supporters regularly fight one another?