So the Fire Phone has been out since Friday and I finally got to mess with one at the AT&T store on 4th street yesterday, mostly because I had twenty minutes to kill before a dentist appointment and the guy at the counter looked bored enough to let me poke at it for way longer than a normal customer would. Quick verdict: its weirder than the reviews made it sound, and not in the way Amazon wants you to think.
Everyone's talking about Dynamic Perspective, the four infrared front-facing cameras that track your head and tilt the UI so icons shift and lock screens do this little parallax wobble when you move the phone around. Its a neat parlor trick. I'll give them that. Tilt the phone and the app icons genuinely feel like they're floating a few millimeters off the glass. But after about ninety seconds I wanted it to just be a normal phone again, and there's no obvious way to turn it off without digging into settings, which tells you something about how confident Amazon is that people will love it versus how confident they are that people will tolerate it.
The feature I actually think matters is Firefly, the button on the side that scans stuff, songs, barcodes, whatever, and tries to sell it to you through Amazon. Point it at a box of cereal, it recognizes the box, offers you a "Buy Now" button for the exact same cereal on Amazon. Point it at a movie poster, it pulls up the movie on Amazon Instant Video. This is Amazon being completely honest about what this phone is for, which I actually respect more than I expected to. Its not pretending to be a general-purpose flagship the way the iPhone or the Galaxy S5 pretend to be neutral platforms. Its a shopping cart with a phone dialer bolted on.
Which brings me to the part that actually annoys me: its AT&T exclusive, full stop, for at least the foreseeable future, and its $199 on a two-year contract for the 32GB model or $649 if you want to buy it outright and still be stuck on AT&T anyway because thats apparently the only carrier it's been configured to work well with. Six-forty-nine. For a phone running a forked version of Android with no Google Play Store, just the Amazon Appstore, which last I checked was still missing a real Instagram client and a bunch of banking apps I actually use. I don't think I'm the target customer here and thats fine, but I keep seeing people compare the price to the iPhone 5s and I think thats the wrong comparison. The iPhone gets you an ecosystem people have already bought into for years. The Fire Phone gets you Amazon's ecosystem, which is great if you're already a Prime household ordering paper towels every six weeks, and much less great if you're not.
One thing I'll say for Amazon: they clearly took the Mayday button from the Kindle Fire tablets and decided it was good enough to put on a phone too, the one where you tap it and an actual human shows up on video in under fifteen seconds to walk you through whatever you're stuck on. I tried it in the store just to see if it was real and yeah, a person popped up almost immediately, visibly a little startled that I was testing it from inside a Best Buy-adjacent AT&T location and not, like, actually stuck on my own phone at home. Kind of felt bad wasting her time honestly. But its a genuinely useful feature buried under two gimmicks that are getting all the attention.
I'm not buying one. I don't think most people reading this should either, not because its broken (it isnt, the hardware feels solid, the screen is fine) but because the whole pitch only works if your phone life and your Amazon life are basically the same thing, and mine really isnt. I buy books there and cat litter on subscribe-and-save and thats about it. If Amazon ships a second version of this next year without the head-tracking nonsense and with a real app store behind it, I'd actually take another look. Until then it's a curiosity you play with at a kiosk for twenty minutes before your dentist appointment, which, in fairness, is exactly what I did.