At long last, Amazon.com has entered the mobile phone market, as expected. The impressively spec’ed “Fire Phone” stacks up with a 4.7″ Gorilla Glass display, a 2.2Ghz CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 13 Megapixel camera with f/2.0 aperture, certainly very competitive with today’s Android flagships. Amazon has, quite wisely, included a number of hardware and software features and services that set it apart from the competition. The Fire Phone also boasts unlimited cloud storage of photos.
The Fire Phone has stereo speakers and a hardware camera button that help it stand out from the crowd. Prime customers? You all get the motherlode of content, so you’ll be testing those speakers with access to a million songs recently made available via Amazon Prime Music. And if you’re not a Prime member? Gotcha covered! You get one year of Prime for free (existing Prime users are extended a year).
Amazon has included their now-trademark Mayday Button, which provides 24/7 support. While this may seem unnecessary, take for example iOS 8, where there are literally dozens of new features to potentially confuse a user, or Android, where major version jumps change the entire UI of the phone. A dedicated support mechanism is a novel and likely welcome addition to the smart phone lineup.
A new service called Firefly that, much like Shazam, can not only listen, but “see.” Optical recognition can help you identify (and subsequently purchase) books, TV shows, movies, games, music, and products. And the best part? There’s an API for third parties to tie into it. This is going to be a very interesting feature.
Dynamic Perspective is billed by Amazon as “A custom-designed sensor system that responds to how you hold, view, and move your phone.” It looks pretty amazing, and appears to give you not only standard gyroscopic control, but also a unique Z-axis subject distance, making for some very interesting effects and system responses to twisting, tilting, and peeking. You can read more about this feature and get the SDK on the Fire Phone developer’s page.
The Fire Phone is available today for pre-order and is exclusive to AT&T, where it is free with AT&T Next, $199 on contract, or $649 off-contract.
“With Dynamic Perspective and Firefly, extend your Android app beyond today’s flat user interfaces”
Interesting!
Which naturally leads to the question: What is the state of the Amazon App Store compared to the Play Store?
My experience with it on the Kindle Fire HDX has been fairly positive. It’s missing a few top-tier apps, and of course all the good Google apps (Maps, Hangouts, Ingress, Now) are nowhere to be found. But it has definitely gotten better with every revision.
One thing I love about it is that you can see all the required permissions, broken down into easily understandable language, before you press the “Install” button. This seems like a small thing, but recent events surrounding app permission creep have made this a nice feature. To go along with it, when an app changes permissions, it doesn’t auto-update even if you have it set to do so. Instead you get a manual update prompt with a warning about changed permissions. This is a welcome alternative to Google Play Store’s permission creep issue.
And of course, there is the free paid app per day feature. Granted, you’ll see three or four pointless apps in a row, but at least once a week there is a good to great app for free. That feature alone makes it a no-brainer to have the store installed on any Android device you own, as once you’ve bought the app you can install it on any device that supports the Amazon store.
With all that good, there is some bad; it can be slow to browse. The rest of my Fire tablet is buttery smooth and almost seems to know what I’m about to tap on before I do it; the store, on the other hand, struggles to keep up with scrolling and taps. I think it may be trying to load too much data in the background, but I don’t know for sure.
Also, it appears to have a much worse good-to-bad app ratio compared to Google’s store. Any app store will have a dozen bogus or simply bad apps to every legitimately useful app, but on the Amazon store it seems to be more like 100 bad apps for every good one.
At&t Next, as I understand it, is the future of At&t without contracts. You can choose to pay for phones sold through at&t up front, or through payment plans of various lengths. There are no free phones with the plan.
Where did that nugget of info come from?
I think they ment no money down.
Right. You either pay retail cost, or you have payments, which are generally affordable enough. The more phones you have, the better the deal. With one or two phones, you’re probably better off avoiding it.
With three, my payment goes from $220 to $150. $180 if I add a new phone.
Exactly, it’s pretty much the same as T-Mobile USA’s “UnCarrier” plan, wherein the retail cost of the phone is distributed over the same 24-month period that would normally carry a contract. If you decide to cancel service before paying it off, there is no ETF as there’s no contract to terminate early. However, you owe the remaining balance due on the phone, else you turn the phone in for credit. And of course you can pay off the phone any time you want.
I ran the numbers on AT&T Next, and it’s not worth it, at least for the iPhone. You’re leasing the phones, so though you do get to upgrade, you have to turn your old phone in at the end of the lease. For a phone with high resale value like the iPhone, you’re making out on its resale value. Plus, if you lose the phone, you have to buy a new one at full retail.
More of the same… no removable battery and no expandable storage.
Edited 2014-06-19 02:24 UTC
A little bit on the pricey side for me… btw It’s an interesting phone to try.
I tried the Fire tablets and They are very good products hardware wise I just don’t like the OS, the UI is awful. BTW they changed it for the phone so… let’s see…
But hey, Amazon entering the phone market is good news no doubt about it.
Ya gotta love Amazon aka The Greatest Ponzi Scheme in History. What other multibillion dollar ‘business’ that sells products below cost, that has never made a profit and will never make a profit has survived so long?
It seems that they are making profit now. According Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com ), Amazon’s net income is US$ 274.0 million (2013).
Edit: Correcting rubbish English 🙁
Edited 2014-06-19 08:25 UTC
Amazon is losing money hand over fist [Any company making less than 15% return on capital and 6% net profit isn’t viable]. It has a price to earnings ration of 510:1 (15:1 is considered high for a retailer). Any ‘profits’ are merely accounting tricks. It can never be profitable because it deliberately sells products at a loss to create an artificially high marketshare.
They know they can outlast their competition so they will continue to operate at a loss until the competition is squashed. Then they will raise prices and we’ll all moan about how amazon is expensive and there are hardly any alternatives.
I can say that they make a ton of money nickel-and-diming their third party resellers. One of the two companies I work for does most of their online selling through Amazon, and while my company makes a decent profit, we are also handing over a good bit of money to Amazon for the privilege of listing our goods. Of course, that’s a legitimate business expense, but it gets more expensive every quarter, it seems.
Amazon also tries to upsell us into their Fulfilled By Amazon and other programs, but the numbers always seem to end up in Amazon’s favor rather than ours so we continue with our traditional listing format.
Of course, they have nothing on eBay; insertion fees, final value fees of up to 10% in some cases, and (eBay-owned) Paypal fees make them about the least attractive marketplace out there. It amazes me that it’s legal for eBay to charge twice for using their service, then a third time for accepting payment. And woe betide the seller who refuses to use Paypal; you may as well close up shop as far as eBay is concerned, as your listings will receive zero traffic.
Edited 2014-06-20 17:52 UTC
The ‘profit’ is just an accounting trick. Unless a company is making net profits of >3% they are actually losing money in real terms.
They survived the first dot-com crash, how many web companies can say that? Not many.
I think you were thinking about twitter. A service which hasn’t made a profit yet, but their stock price is at 38 dollars… whatever. Let’s see how we do when Goldman Sachs decides to cash-out and the inevitable second dot-com crash happens.
Edited 2014-06-19 08:57 UTC
Amazon is a ponzi scheme in everything but name. Speculators are hoping for a big payout which will never arrive. The only people making money are Jeff Bezos (a former Wall Street banker) and his VC cronies. One day Amazon will suddenly implode and the small investors will lose everything. The bankers and founders will have skimmed of hundreds of billions in the interim.
The vast majority of tech companies are sophisticated marketing scams set up by venture capitalists to steal money from gullible investors. Very few have any chance of ever making a profit one (eg Google).
Edited 2014-06-20 03:16 UTC
An unproven phone with just OK specs compared to other Android flagships, with it’s only top bill feature being a gimmick about as useful as Samsung’s gesture support. Oh and it’s priced equal to the most expensive phones on the market. Hey Amazon, if you want to sell at premium prices you need a premium product, not a product with a gimmicky feature that makes your parts cost more.
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