So the Fire Phone actually went on sale today. AT&T only, $199 for the 32GB one on a two-year contract, $299 if you want 64GB, and there's a version with no contract for $649 that basically nobody is going to buy at that price when a Moto G exists. I've been half-following this thing since the Seattle event back in June, mostly because the marketing made it sound like Amazon invented a new kind of phone instead of just adding some sensors to a normal one.
I don't have AT&T. Haven't since 2011, when I got fed up with dropped calls in my own kitchen and switched to Verizon out of spite. So today was really just me wandering into the AT&T store at the mall on my lunch break to poke at a display unit, which, fine, is a very on-brand thing for me to do on a Friday.
Here's the thing everyone's talking about: Dynamic Perspective. Four little infrared cameras in the corners of the screen track your face and tilt the interface as you move the phone around, so app icons shift and lock screens have this fake-3D parallax thing going. I tilted it left, I tilted it right, I did the thing where you shake your wrist to pull up a menu. And look, it works, technically, it's not vaporware. It's just also completely pointless. It's a magic trick you show your coworkers once and then never think about again, kind of like when 3D TVs were the thing for about eighteen months and then everyone quietly forgot they existed. I stood there for a solid ten minutes and could not come up with a single scenario where tilting my phone to see around an icon makes my life better. The demo units even had a little placard explaining what Dynamic Perspective was, which is usually a bad sign for a feature — if you need a sign to explain why your headline feature matters, it probably doesn't.
The one thing on this phone I actually think is smart is Mayday. It's a button, sits right in the quick-settings, and it connects you to a live video support person in under fifteen seconds, allegedly, and they can literally draw on your screen to show you what to tap. Amazon's had this on the Kindle Fire tablets for a couple years now and by all accounts people who've actually used it love it. My mother-in-law would use this. My mother-in-law calls me instead of Amazon's tech support line, which tells you something about how confusing tech support usually is. If Amazon just built a great, boring phone with Mayday built in, no gimmicks, I think that's actually a compelling product for a certain kind of buyer. Instead they wrapped it around Dynamic Perspective and Firefly (the button that scans objects, barcodes, and songs so you can buy them on Amazon, because of course that's what it's for) and the whole thing feels less like a phone and more like a shopping cart with a dialer.
Also worth saying out loud: Amazon reported earnings this week and it was not pretty. A loss around $126 million for the quarter, way worse than what people expected, and the stock got hammered on it. So this phone is launching into a week where the company's own investors are nervous about how much money Amazon is willing to burn chasing stuff like this. I don't think that's a coincidence so much as it's just Amazon being Amazon — they've never cared much about quarterly optics when there's a bigger bet on the table. Whether a phone locked to one carrier, running a forked version of Android with no Google Play Store, is the bet that pays off, I have real doubts. No Play Store is the part that would actually kill it for me even before we get to the carrier thing. You get Amazon's Appstore instead, and it is nowhere close to as complete.
Anyway. The salesperson at the AT&T store asked if I wanted to switch carriers to buy one and I said no thanks about four times before he got the hint. Free year of Amazon Prime is baked into the purchase if you do buy it, which is a genuinely nice perk on paper, works out to about a hundred bucks of value, but it's not enough to get me to switch networks for a phone whose main trick is a screen that wiggles when you move your wrist.
I'll be curious to check back on this one in six months and see if anyone's still using Firefly for anything besides showing it off to a relative over Thanksgiving.