So Amazon's Fire Phone actually went on sale this past Friday, the 25th, and because I apparently have nothing better to do with a lunch break, I walked over to the AT&T store on my way back from getting a sandwich and asked to play with one. Verdict up front: I'm not buying it, and I don't think you should either, but it's a weirder device than the reviews made it sound.
The pitch, if you haven't been paying attention, is $199 on a new 2-year AT&T contract or $649 if you want it unlocked and untethered, which nobody is going to pay. AT&T has it exclusively, at least for now, which is its own annoyance I'll get to. It's a 4.7-inch phone, 13 megapixel camera, runs a heavily forked version of Android that Amazon calls Fire OS, and it comes with a full year of Amazon Prime thrown in. That last part is actually not nothing: Prime jumped to $99 a year back in March, so on the contract price you're basically getting the phone for a hundred bucks once you back that out. Amazon's very good at math like that.
The two headline features are Dynamic Perspective and Firefly. Dynamic Perspective is the one with four extra front-facing cameras tracking your face so the screen shifts and tilts depending on where your head is. The guy at the counter tilted it for me to show the home screen icons doing this little parallax wobble, like they're floating a few millimeters off the glass. I'll give it this, it's a genuinely neat party trick for about ninety seconds. Then I started tilting it myself and got a faint headachy feeling, the same way 3D movies used to bug me at the theater, and I put it down. It's the kind of feature that demos beautifully and means nothing three days into ownership.
Firefly is the button on the side that turns the camera into a scanner for basically anything — book covers, QR codes, phone numbers on a business card, songs playing over the store speakers. I pointed it at a Red Bull can sitting near the register and it identified it almost instantly, then popped up a buy-it-on-Amazon button, obviously. I scanned the cover of a magazine on the counter and it nailed that too. It genuinely works well as a piece of recognition tech. But it's not subtle about what it's for. Every path through this phone ends at "add to cart." That's not a knock exactly, Amazon built a phone to sell you Amazon, fine, I just wish they'd been a little less coy about calling it a shopping device instead of dressing it up as some kind of visionary hardware breakthrough.
The AT&T exclusivity thing bugs me more than it probably should. I've been on Verizon for something like ten years now, mostly because switching a family plan is a genuine pain and not because I love Verizon, believe me. But every time a phone I'm even mildly curious about launches locked to one carrier I don't have, it just quietly reminds me how little control any of us actually have over what we can buy this year without a full account migration. Small complaint, I know. Nobody's forcing me to want a Fire Phone.
Amazon reported earnings last Thursday too, the day before this thing hit stores, and posted a loss of over a hundred million dollars for the quarter — the stock dropped hard on it, something like ten percent. I don't think the Fire Phone is the reason for that on its own, they've got a dozen things eating cash right now, but it's hard not to connect the dots watching a company bet real manufacturing money on a phone whose main trick made me a little queasy in an AT&T store on a Tuesday.
Apple, for comparison, told everyone on their earnings call last week they'd moved something like 35 million iPhones last quarter, which is a genuinely absurd number to sit next to. I'm not an Apple cheerleader by any means, my daily phone is an old Nexus and I intend to keep it that way for a while. But the gap between "we sold 35 million of these" and "please come tilt this one at the mall" says most of what you need to know about where this launch actually lands.
Back to my sandwich now, which had gone slightly cold by the time I got out of there.