So I finally got my hands on the Fire Phone yesterday. Not mine, obviously, I'm not made of money and I'm still under contract with Verizon until next March anyway. But the AT&T store on Route 9 has a couple of demo units bolted to the counter and I've been curious enough about this thing since the launch event a few weeks back that I made a special trip during my lunch break just to poke at it.
Quick recap for anyone who's been living under a rock: Amazon put out its first phone on July 25th. $199 on a two year contract, $649 if you want it unlocked, and it's AT&T only, which already annoys me on principle. I don't love the idea of a hardware maker picking one carrier and just going steady with them. Feels very 2008.
The headline features are Dynamic Perspective and Firefly, and honestly, after fifteen minutes with both, I walked out less impressed than I expected to be. Dynamic Perspective uses four little cameras on the front of the phone to track where your face is and tilt the interface accordingly, so icons shift and lock screens do this sort of parallax wobble when you move your head. The guy at the store showed me a maps demo where tilting the phone peeks around buildings. It's a neat trick the first time. By the third time he showed me he was still acting like it was magic and I was just sort of nodding along.
Firefly is the other one, the dedicated button on the side that scans basically anything, book covers, a bottle of ketchup, whatever's playing over the store speakers, and tries to sell it to you on Amazon. I get it as a strategy. Amazon isn't in the phone business to be in the phone business, they're in it to shorten the distance between "I want this thing" and "I bought this thing from Amazon." That part's honestly clever and probably the truest part of the whole product. But sitting there scanning a display of phone cases just to watch product listings pop up isn't exactly a killer feature for me. My buddy who works in retail says he'd rather just type into the search bar, and I don't disagree.
Amazon reported their Q2 numbers last week and posted a loss of something like $126 million, and a chunk of that got pinned on Fire Phone development and marketing. That's a lot of money for four extra cameras and a barcode scanner button, is my read on it, though I'm sure Bezos would tell me I'm missing the bigger picture and this is all about owning the customer relationship end to end or whatever. Maybe. I just know that when I handed the demo unit back I didn't feel any pull to actually own one, and that seems like a problem when you're trying to break into a market that Apple and Samsung have had locked down for years.
Unrelated tangent, but while I was at the AT&T store the guy also tried to upsell me on a tablet plan for something like twenty extra minutes even after I told him three separate times I wasn't switching carriers. I don't know if it's commission structure or just a script they have to run through, but it's exhausting, and it's the kind of thing that makes we want to just do everything online even though I know that's part of how we got the shopping-by-camera-button phone in the first place.
Elsewhere this week, Twitter's stock jumped something like 30% after their earnings came out Tuesday, on the back of user growth numbers that actually beat what people expected for once. Funny contrast, one company betting big on a piece of hardware nobody asked for and taking a hit for it, another one just quietly growing its user base and getting rewarded for it by the market. I don't have a grand unified theory about what that means. I just noticed it happening in the same week and it stuck with me.
Anyway. If you're AT&T and curious, go play with the demo unit at your local store. Fifteen minutes is honestly enough time to form an opinion on this one.