So I finally got my hands on an Amazon Fire Phone yesterday. Not mine, thank god, a buddy of mine works retail at the AT&T store off Route 9 and let me poke at the demo unit for a solid twenty minutes while he was on his lunch. And look, Ive been reading the reviews since it launched a couple weeks back, but there's nothing like actually holding a thing to form an opinion you can stand behind.
Short version: its not good. Not "bad" exactly, it works, the screen is fine, but it doesn't know what it wants to be.
The headline feature is this thing Amazon calls Dynamic Perspective, where the phone has four extra front-facing cameras tracking your face so the UI tilts and shifts as you move your head. On the home screen it does this parallax thing with the app icons that's supposed to feel 3D. I'll give them this, its a genuinely neat magic trick the first time you see it. My buddy did the little head-tilt demo on the lock screen wallpaper (its got these lenticular-style images that shift depth as you move) and for about four seconds I thought, huh, that's kind of cool. Then I picked up the phone myself, tilted my own head around, and about ninety seconds later I just wanted it to stop. Its a party trick. It is not a reason to buy a $199-with-two-year-contract phone in 2014 when a Galaxy S5 or an iPhone 5s is sitting right next to it doing everything else better.
The other big pitch is Firefly, hold a button and point the camera at basically anything, a book, a DVD, a bottle of Tylenol, a phone number on a billboard, and it tries to identify it and (surprise) offer to sell it to you on Amazon. I pointed it at a bag of Cheetos on the counter and it correctly ID'd it in about two seconds, which is legitimately impressive tech. But then I sat there thinking, when exactly am I going to use this? Im not walking around Target scanning cereal boxes with my phone out. Its a solution looking for a problem, and Amazon built an entire physical button on the side of the phone dedicated to it.
Where it actually falls apart is the app situation, which honestly should have been the whole story. Its running a forked version of Android under the hood (Fire OS), so it doesn't get the real Google Play store, it gets Amazon's app store instead. My buddy pulled up the store and there's no real Instagram, no Google Maps, and Gmail only works through the browser or a clunky email client, not as a proper app. For a phone launching in the back half of 2014 that is not a small gap. Its the kind of thing that reads fine on a spec sheet and then just wrecks the actual experience of owning the thing day to day.
Amazon's Q2 earnings call a couple weeks ago wasn't exactly a celebration either, a bigger loss than Wall Street was expecting, and Bezos spent a chunk of the call talking up the Fire Phone and Prime Air and warehouses instead of, you know, explaining the loss. Stock took a hit after that. Im not saying the Fire Phone alone tanked the quarter, Amazon spends money on a hundred different bets at once, that's kind of their whole thing. But it wasn't the slam dunk debut you'd want a few weeks before school shopping season, when every carrier store has a table of phones fighting for the same customer.
Selfishly, I was kind of rooting for it. I like when a company that isn't Apple or Samsung tries something genuinely weird with hardware instead of just cranking out another slab. The Firefly stuff really is clever engineering even if the use case is thin. But "clever engineering" doesn't sell phones at a AT&T counter to a normal person who just wants their texts and Instagram to work, and right now this one doesn't clear that bar for me. My buddy said hes sold exactly one unit since it launched, and that guy returned it four days later.
Anyway. Back to my actual phone, an aging Nexus 5 with a cracked corner I keep meaning to get fixed and never do.