I watched the Amazon event Tuesday from my couch with a bag of pretzels, half paying attention because the USA-Ghana game was still sitting in my DVR queue and I didn't want spoilers scrolling across my Twitter feed while I waited. Bezos comes out, does the whole "we don't do things the normal way" bit, and then unveils the Fire Phone. $199 on contract with AT&T, which is the exact price of an iPhone 5s right now, so don't go expecting a discount for buying into a whole new ecosystem. The headline feature is this thing called Dynamic Perspective — four infrared cameras tucked into the corners of the screen that track your face and tilt the interface as you move your head. Icons peek around corners. Maps lean into turns. It's supposed to feel three-dimensional without glasses, and in the demo video it looked genuinely neat for about ninety seconds.
My actual first reaction, though, was "why." Not why would anyone build this, because clearly someone can build almost anything given enough engineers and a deadline. Why would I want my lock screen doing a little parallax dance every time I shift my grip on the bus. Gimmick is a strong word and I'm going to use it anyway, at least until I've had one in my hand for more than a keynote video.
The feature I actually think is smart is Mayday. Hold the button, get a real support person on video in under fifteen seconds, and they can see your screen and draw circles on it to show you where to tap. Amazon's had this on the Kindle Fire tablets for about a year now, and the average wait time is apparently closer to ten seconds, which is faster than I get put on hold for my own bank on a Monday morning. If that support model carries over to the phone, my mother-in-law's tech support calls to me might actually go down. I will take that trade every single time.
Then there's Firefly, the recognition feature that scans whatever the camera's pointed at and tries to sell you the matching product. Point it at a ketchup bottle, buy the ketchup. Point it at a movie poster, rent the movie. Point it at a song playing over a coffee shop speaker, buy the song. It's Amazon turning the camera into a barcode scanner for the entire physical world, and I'd argue that's the real product here, not the phone itself. The tilting 3D screen is the thing that gets people talking about the keynote. Firefly is the thing that gets you to checkout.
Buried under all that Fire Phone coverage this week was a much smaller story that I found funnier the longer I sat with it. TechCrunch reported that an app called Yo raised $1.2 million. Yo does exactly one thing. You open it, tap a friend's name, and it sends them the word "Yo." No text field, no photo, nothing else. That's the entire app. I read the headline twice assuming it was a joke, and it wasn't. A couple of guys reportedly built the first version in about eight hours, and now it has real seed money from real investors who write real checks.
I don't have much of a hot take on Yo beyond finding the timing funny in a slightly bleak way. Somewhere this week a team spent what was probably a year of engineering effort building face-tracking infrared cameras into a phone. Somewhere else, a team got seven figures for an app whose entire feature set fits in three letters. Both of those things happened within about 48 hours of each other, and if you want a snapshot of where money and attention are sitting in tech right now, that's a pretty honest one. One bet is on reinventing how you touch a screen. The other is betting that a joke, sent to the right group chat at the right moment, is worth funding on its own. Both bets have paid off before, at least for a while.
I'm not pre-ordering a Fire Phone. I did download Yo, mostly out of morbid curiosity, and by Wednesday I'd forgotten it was even on my phone until someone in my group chat sent me one at two in the morning. I still don't know what they meant by it. That might be the whole point.