So Amazon had its big phone event yesterday afternoon and I watched most of it live, streaming choppy video on my work laptop while I was supposed to be eating a sandwich at my desk. Jeff Bezos came out, did the thing where he holds up the product like its a baby, and spent something like twenty minutes on a feature called Dynamic Perspective before he even said the word "phone" out loud. Thats the pitch now, apparently: four extra front-facing cameras and some infrared sensors so the screen tilts and shifts depending on where your head is. You can peek around app icons. Maps have a sort of fake-3D parallax thing going on. It looked neat in the demo video for about ninety seconds and then I started wondering who asked for this.
Its called the Fire Phone, which, fine, at least its consistent with the tablet line. $199 with a 2-year contract gets you the 32GB model, $299 for 64GB, and, this is the part that actually made me groan out loud in an open office and get a look from the guy next to me, its AT&T exclusive. Just AT&T. In 2014. After watching Samsung and everybody else ship phones on every carrier under the sun for years, Amazon rolls out with one partner and a two-year contract structure like its still 2011. I get that carrier exclusives used to be how you launched a flagship (RIP the original iPhone/AT&T deal, sort of), but it feels like a weirdly conservative choice for a company that made its name selling direct to anyone with a credit card.
The feature I actually think might stick around is Firefly. You hold the phone up, it listens or looks at whatever's in front of it, a book, a movie playing on TV, a bar code, a phone number printed on a flyer, and it tells you what it is and, shockingly, offers to sell it to you on Amazon. Thats at least honest about what Amazon is. Its not pretending to be a neutral platform. Its a very well-built impulse-purchase machine with a screen and a SIM card. I dont know if I want that pointed at my living room, but I get why theyd build it.
They also announced Mayday, which is the live video tech-support button from the Fire tablets, ported over to a phone — you tap it and an actual human shows up on your screen within, they claim, fifteen seconds, and can draw on your screen to show you how to do something. I used Mayday on my sister's Kindle Fire HDX over Christmas when she couldn't figure out how to move a photo off it, and it genuinely worked well, so I'll give them that one without complaint. Its the rare tech support feature that doesn't make you want to throw the device across the room.
Heres my actual complaint, the small one nobody's going to write a headline about: the whole presentation had this vibe of solving problems I don't have. I don't want my icons to tilt when I move my head. I've never once stood in a store aisle desperately needing to know what a box of cereal is. What I want from a phone in the summer of 2014 is a camera that doesn't take four seconds to open, a battery that survives a full day of actually using GPS, and maybe not another ecosystem lock-in to manage on top of the two I've already got. Dynamic Perspective is a cool tech demo. I'm just not sure its a reason to buy a phone, and I say that as someone who still has an original Kindle sitting in a drawer because I liked the company enough to give it a shot.
Anyway. Ordering starts in a couple weeks I think, and it ships mid-July. I'm curious enough that I might go play with one in an actual AT&T store once its out, mostly to see if the head-tracking thing makes me a little sick, which is my honest prediction. My lunch break, for what its worth, was better spent than most Tuesdays.