Playing With Amazon's Fire Phone So You Don't Have To

I finally got my hands on the Fire Phone yesterday afternoon, at the AT&T store on the corner near my office, the one with the sad little demo table by the window. It's been about a week since Amazon actually started selling the thing on July 25th, and I'd been curious enough to go poke at one instead of just reading reviews all day like a normal person.

Short version: the screen tilts when you move your head. That's it. That's the headline feature.

Okay, it's a little more than that. Amazon calls it Dynamic Perspective, and it uses four infrared cameras in the corners of the phone to track your face and shift the interface based on where your eyes are, so icons feel like they've got depth and app screens sort of lean and peek at you when you tilt the phone. The demo unit had a game loaded up where you tilt to look around a 3D scene, and I'll admit it's a neat five-second trick. The guy working the store leaned over and said "cool right?" and I said yeah, because it is, briefly. Then you start wondering what it's actually for, and the honest answer seems to be: not much yet. A launcher animation. A few games built specifically to show it off. That's the whole case so far.

The other big feature, Firefly, is more interesting to me honestly. You hold a button and point the camera at basically anything, a book, a box of cereal, a movie playing on TV, a song coming out of a speaker, and it tries to identify it and, shocker, offer to sell it to you on Amazon. It worked fine on the cereal box in about two seconds. It's a genuinely clever bit of engineering wrapped around what is transparently a shopping cart with extra steps. I don't say that as a knock, exactly. Amazon's a store. Of course their phone's coolest trick is "buy this now."

Here's my actual complaint, and it's not about the hardware at all: it's AT&T exclusive. I'm on Verizon, have been for years, and I'm not about to eat an early termination fee to go try a first-generation phone whose main selling point wore off by the second demo. So for a huge chunk of people reading this, the phone is a moot point regardless of what I think of it, which feels like a weird way to launch something you want a lot of people talking about.

And then there's the price, which nobody at the store could really explain to my satisfaction. $199.99 with a two-year contract for the 32GB model, $299.99 for 64GB, that's flagship pricing, the same range as a Galaxy S5 or an iPhone. Off contract it's $649 and $749. For comparison you can walk out with a genuinely excellent Moto G for under two hundred bucks, full price, no contract at all, and it'll do email and Instagram and everything else a normal person needs a phone for just fine. I own one. It's been completely reliable since spring.

I'll say this for Amazon: they threw in a free year of Prime with the phone, which if you weren't already a member is worth $99 on its own, so the actual delta narrows some once you do that math. And Mayday, the live video help button that pops up a real human in like fifteen seconds, is a genuinely good idea that I wish more devices had, even if I only tested it for thirty seconds before feeling guilty about wasting some poor support rep's afternoon on a demo unit.

Amazon's stock took a beating after their earnings call the week before this launched, a $126 million loss for the quarter, and reading between the lines it's pretty clear a lot of that spending was Fire Phone and the Fire TV stick and whatever else is cooking in Seattle right now. Bezos plays the long game with this stuff, always has, so one rough launch week doesn't mean much on its own. But sitting in that AT&T store tilting a phone back and forth to make a cartoon bird look 3D, I kept thinking about how much of this generation of gadgets is chasing a demo moment instead of a daily habit. The tilt thing is a demo moment. Firefly might actually become a habit for some people. We'll see which one Amazon keeps funding a year from now.

Anyway. If you're already locked into AT&T and you love Amazon enough to make it your home screen, it's a real phone that does real phone things. Everyone else, I'd wait.