5 ms·

Poll: Are you moving to the Amazon Fire Phone?

23 points by zengr 12y ago

Are you going to move away from your current phone (iOS, Windows, Android, others) to Amazon Fire Phone?

pling 12y ago
No. I'm moving away from smartphones entirely. The negative impact on my life is higher than the advantages.
- bildung 12y ago
  Hah, I did the same :) While I still have some phones lying around for dev, I personally use an old Nokia dumbphone. No distractions anymore, plus nearly 4 weeks without need of a recharge!
  - pling 12y ago
    Yep Nokia C2-01 here. I don't get 4 weeks (people keep phoning me still) but I'm managine 7-9 days which is better than 7-9 hours!
- lockes5hadow 12y ago
  Couldn't just turn off all the pointless attention eating notifications and enjoy the useful features?
  - mycodebreaks 12y ago
    On a similar note, I started removing apps which made me waste my time. Facebook was one of those apps for me.
  - pling 12y ago
    Yeah I removed everything and I ended up with the same feature set as a Nokia C2-01 so I bought one. The only two things I missed (for a bit) was: 1. Email. Turns out people don't have to be replied to instantly and they accept that after a bit. 2. Music. Turns out the C2-01 does a rather good job of this as well after I realised it and stuffed a 4Gb Micro SD in it.
- alandarev 12y ago
  I find google calendar, navigator, and evernote in my pocket more productive than not having them. Here is the tip, you can disable anything you consider unproductive in the smartphone.
  - tomp 12y ago
    Including the large screen and short battery life?
  - pling 12y ago
    I find them terribly constricting. If you don't conform to the constraints that are forced upon you by the ecosystem and the device then you are at the mercy of the ecosystem and the device and this is nothing but bad news when you hit a problem or need to do something free-form. I too used Google Calendar, but it's terribly complicated to enter an event in on an Android device accurately, the web interface is clunky and the sync isn't reliable if you're in a poor reception area. Same with evernote and any notetaking software (google keep as well). It's impossible to take notes on the fly quickly without observing the device otherwise you end up listing garbage and missing the stuff going on in front of you. Then occasionally you might find a picture says a thousand words - which you're instantly stuffed with. Your focus is 80% on the machine and 20% on the problem when notetaking on a computer of any description. I carry a little notebook (3 for £1 in Tiger here in the UK) and a mechanical pencil (doesn't need sharpening and has a rubber - Rotring Tikky box of 10 for £11.99 on ebay) for notetaking. As for scheduling, I know what is when (don't underestimate the power of thinking about this rather than contracting it out) and for navigation, I'll scribble out a diagram before I leave of where I'm going. Gotta use that geography GCSE for something. And no you can't disable everything unproductive on a smartphone. I tried it and my device slowly switched all the features back on again. I decided that the following process should apply: 1. Start with what you need. 2. Add what you want. Point 1 turned out to be a dumbphone (calls and SMS) and 2 never materialised.
- ASneakyFox 12y ago
  I solved this issue by never unmuting my phone. Not even for phone calls (unless im expecting an important call). My phone doesn't tell me when to use it. I do it the other way around. I check my phone maybe 2-3 times a day. When I wake up. Once a little after lunch. And once at night. The main thing you have to do is not feel like its your job to immediatly attend to any contact. Treat your phone like a laptop. Emails you should reapond to in 24 hours. Text or phone calls don't need to be answered. Your phone saves your call logs for your convenience. Just get back to that person when you have a free chance. Our ancestors survived not being able to talk to any one at any moment. We don't have to either.
  - jhrrsn 12y ago
    I've been doing this for a while and, while it infuriates some people, I've found it to be very freeing. Mailbox is a great way of dealing with email, and Do Not Disturb lets me allow certain important calls through if I need to. I enjoy the feeling of being in control of my phone, rather than at its mercy!
senthilnayagam 12y ago
don't want to use att
lawl 12y ago
Amazon Fire Phone is Android, just without gapps. I don't quite get the point of this poll tbh.
- andybak 12y ago
  It's a fork of Android with major differences and no compatibility with Google Services (which to many people is one of the defining characteristics of Android). So you are technically correct but not in a particularly interesting way.
- adzicg 12y ago
  I bought the Kindle Fire HD tablet as an experiment a few years back, and found it almost useless for my daily tasks. It was OK for watching movies and reading books, but none of the productivity stuff I wanted from an android device was there. Stock Gmail app on android is much better integrated with Gmail than a bare-bones IMAP client (multiple accounts nicely recognised, different sync policies for labels etc), I missed the nice Google calendar integration etc. My business pretty much runs on google apps, so for that use case there is a huge difference between something running android and something running well integrated google services. I assumed getting google apps on Fire would be just a matter of installing, but it would require rooting the device and rebuilding the OS from scratch, which I didn't want to waste time on. I assume Fire phone will have the same issue. It is Android, but Android without Google services is pretty much pointless for me.
- kybernetikos 12y ago
  These days not having gapps will break a surprising number of apps. I know this because I run cyanogenmod without gapps.
dtrizzle 12y ago
No. Can't do AT&T (hate them). Can't do Android without the play store (no apps).
cjg 12y ago
Given the number of yeses - currently zero versus 131 noes - Amazon hopefully has a different target market in mind.
- chmars 12y ago
  Relevant is what people do, not what they say … so let's wait for facts.
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  Given the spec of it, people with more money than sense, but apple already has that market cornered with the iPhone...
AndrewDucker 12y ago
I'll be waiting to see if any of the exclusive stuff is more than a gimmick, or if it's actually useful. And then waiting to see when it's available in the UK.
pibefision 12y ago
No. I don't see why I should move to it.
Kiro 12y ago
Yes, it looks beautiful and I love the UI.
dangero 12y ago
If the Amazon phone follows their Kindle line we will see the price rapidly reduce throughout the year, so I'll be interested to see how that changes the poll. Wouldn't change my opinion. I bought a Kindle Fire gen 1 and ended up hardly using it compared to my iPads, so I'm not very curious about the phone, but still interested in how it will affect other people's opinions.
Lazare 12y ago
No. I like Nexus phones running stock Android, or phones with good, cheap, solid hardware that can easily be rooted and made to run a custom ROM. The Fire Phone is neither; out of the box it's about as far away from the Nexus experience as it's possible to get, and even if it's easy to ROM it, the price they're charging makes that impractical. The Fire Phone will live and die by their ability to find a receptive audience for their weird features; I'm not in that group.
petercooper 12y ago
I'll have to see it before I totally write it off, but the 3D stuff reminds me of the hype around Nintendo's 3D stuff. Yeah, it was cool, looks great, etc, but ultimately not seamless enough to warrant actually using it long term. And then for the rest of it, it's like picking an Amazon tablet over a regular one, I don't want to be locked into their app store, etc.
alien3d 12y ago
No 1. got 4 inchi,7 inchi ,14 inchi..just for development. i think other programmer like me. buy for development testing.
blueskin_ 12y ago
Nope. Looks horrendously expensive and only has average specs, significantly worse than the S5 which will probably be my next phone, and it doesn't have CyanogenMod support, an SD card, or a removable battery; not to mention that as it's amazon it's probably locked down to fuck and exists to sell worthless 'cloud'... I'd rather buy an HTC phone than that, which has all those drawbacks but can still have CyanogenMod installed on it, plus isn't funding Amazon... Oh, and apparently it doesn't have the play store, so it running android is essentially worthless, especially if amazon disabled apk installation in the process of locking you into their services. Fire Phone has to be called that because if you try it, you'll get burnt.
encoderer 12y ago
I wish I could find a poll like this for the iPhone in 2007. It had no carrier subsidies, so was mega expensive. It had no app store, so totally pre the "theres an app for that" phenomena. Corporate IT departments were unfriendly to it. And it didn't offer 3G! Now, I know Apple was able to get away with that because it was inventing the whole category. And that no company, not Apple, nobody, will have the same grace period. (Ask the Palm Pre about that). But I can certainly see some killer UI experiences and awesome integration with Amazon. And honestly I think my wife would consider switching solely for the free photo storage.
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  Because paying $700 for the privilege of being able to buy more stuff from amazon is really awesome, right? I don't use any such services, but I know google give a lot of free storage. Apple give some too, as do Microsoft, even...
mathnode 12y ago
No. Because my iPhone helps me to be productive. It's not a shopping cart (there's an app for that should I wish).
firePhoneAmazng 12y ago
Yes. I work for Amazon.
- amrrs 12y ago
  Is that because you'll get it for free?
Htsthbjig 12y ago
No, thank you. I will never use a gatekeeper to access Internet. For me Internet should be a network, not a top down centralized service. Amazon Silk means every single page that you visit is registered by an American company and obviously the NSA. At least when I use a conventional browser, they have to work harder to spy on me.
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  Interesting - I know nothing about Silk; does it proxy through Amazon servers or similar? If so, yet another reason to never touch this phone. Edit: Even worse, it actually outright renders the page on Amazon's servers. All the privacy violation of proxying with bonus MITM on TLS connections.
  - zengr 12y ago
    Yup, you are right: "To minimize latency and page load times, Amazon Silk routes requests through remote proxy servers powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. These cloud servers provide high-performance connection speeds and computing power not normally available to a mobile form factor." http://docs.aws.amazon.com/silk/latest/developerguide/introduction.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/silk/latest/developerguide/introd...
  - jgillich 12y ago
    At least on the Kindle Fire tablets, it is possible to disable the proxy.
bowlofpetunias 12y ago
I find any decent phone as good as the next one, all of them offering the handful of features and apps I really use. Which makes my choice of phone more a matter of "lifestyle accessory", and being a sucker for great design, the Fire Phone just seems very plain and "meh" to me.
steviee 12y ago
No.
mrmondo 12y ago
No because Amazon is a company I never want to have anything to do with.
- SifJar 12y ago
  As opposed to the individuals who produce every other phone? Terrible reasoning, every phone is made by a company.
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    Apple, Microsoft, and Google are hardly paragons of ethical behaviour, sure, but they also aren't Amazon. Not to mention that at least with Android you can install your own ROM, which can be google-free if you want.
nailer 12y ago
I'd buy it for $200 unlocked. $649 is ridiculous. So is the concept of locking.
- rweir 12y ago
  how much do you think other high-end smartphones actually cost? iphone 5s 32GB: $US749 samsung galaxy s5: ~$us800 etc
  - nailer 12y ago
    The Kindle Fire is generally thought of as a mid range smartphone. Comparing to other mid range smartphones: - Moto E is $150: http://observationdeck.io9.com/moto-e-review-1594224578 http://observationdeck.io9.com/moto-e-review-1594224578 - Moto G is $196: http://www.engadget.com/products/motorola/moto/g/ http://www.engadget.com/products/motorola/moto/g/ - Nexus 5 was $349 but has dropped: http://www.theverge.com/products/nexus-5/7422 http://www.theverge.com/products/nexus-5/7422 Amazon typically operate on low margins. The Kindle Fire is designed to sell Amazon services. A loss leader based on followup purchases ala xbox wouldn't be entirely unheard of.
amrrs 12y ago
No. Why on earth would i want NSA and other spygates to watch me 24x7 with 4 cameras (even in night!) #CrazyStuffs!
- leorocky 12y ago
  This phone is not actually made by the NSA, it's made by Amazon. The NSA doesn't make consumer facing hardware. If you are worried about Amazon being legally obligated to hand over your private information from your phone you would have that same worry with any other private smartphone vendor. I have never heard of smartphone cameras being used to spy on people 24/7 either.
  - amrrs 12y ago
    Yes. This is not made by NSA and i'm not saying that this is made for NSA. But ultimately the bigData is going to go there. And i don't worry about Apple because they don't have to find what books i like and when i need an Air cooler, but Amazon needs those information. Either me, never heard of such smartphones tracking user's head and face everytime - so precisely.
    - SifJar 12y ago
      Of course you've never heard of it, they're being "innovative". They need something to differentiate their product from every other phone on the market.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
$649 for a phone with a smaller, lower-resolution screen, an nonstandard fork of Android 4.2, and a fancy sensor gimmick. Definitely not.
CmonDev 12y ago
It is targeted at (potential) Amazon Prime customers. Of which I am not one.
hershel 12y ago
We're probably the last population targeted by this phone. It probably targets seniors or heavy prime users.
- zengr 12y ago
  Heavy prime users? But why? They are already locked in their ecommerce system. I am sure try are not trying to compete with apple or samsung but want to increase the adoption of amazon.com. Which means they want non prime users to use this phone.
  - hershel 12y ago
    Like the author says ,it's a pretty forced explanation, but just to get more money out of them, the excel table shows how much: http://stratechery.com/2014/amazons-whale-strategy/ http://stratechery.com/2014/amazons-whale-strategy/
erikb 12y ago
I think the question is whether they are able to position themselves in a way that people can recognize a real additional value. "For normal smart phone stuff I would use my Android phone. But I really also want to do X and that is something only Amazon does well." I don't think they can provide a real USP that can't be copied by the Android and Apple guys fast, though.
laichzeit0 12y ago
No. I'm not trading the Apple ecosystem for a mere "device". Regardless if it has any slight technical advantages.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
DanBC 12y ago
No. I am going to move to Mozilla and Linux for as much as I can. My sister gave me her old iPhone (a lovely gift!) and I find it somewhat frustrating to use. I'm not sure I trust Amazon to have my telephony information. Also (and I sY this every time I comment in any Amazon thread in the hope that someone sees it and does something about it) Amazon search is hopelessly broken. Often I abandon a search and go somewhere else to buy stuff because sorting and filtering just doesn't work. I am amazed that someone in search hasn't targetted this. Perhaps Algoli can get this?
leorocky 12y ago
I own a Kindle Fire HDX, which is a nice tablet, but really the only reason I own it instead of a regular Android tablet is because Amazon Video is not available on Android. Given that I don't care about video for a tiny phone screen, my answer is a definitive no. The dynamic perspective feature seems like weird UI gimmick. I don't really like head tracking features. I turned that off in my Galaxy S5. Taking a picture of a product is a cool idea, but there's no reason they can't also put that on other phones. Also Amazon never updates their hardware to new versions of the software. I owned the original Kindle Fire and it never got any of the HD or HDX software changes, nothing. Nobody has beaten Apple in this regard, but Android isn't as bad as Amazon's forked version. Finally, the Amazon app store is kind of a desert. I just don't get what they were thinking with this thing. It seems dead on arrival.

23 points by zengr 12y ago

Are you going to move away from your current phone (iOS, Windows, Android, others) to Amazon Fire Phone?

pling 12y ago

No. I'm moving away from smartphones entirely. The negative impact on my life is higher than the advantages.

bildung 12y ago
Hah, I did the same :) While I still have some phones lying around for dev, I personally use an old Nokia dumbphone. No distractions anymore, plus nearly 4 weeks without need of a recharge!
- pling 12y ago
  Yep Nokia C2-01 here. I don't get 4 weeks (people keep phoning me still) but I'm managine 7-9 days which is better than 7-9 hours!
lockes5hadow 12y ago
Couldn't just turn off all the pointless attention eating notifications and enjoy the useful features?
- mycodebreaks 12y ago
  On a similar note, I started removing apps which made me waste my time. Facebook was one of those apps for me.
- pling 12y ago
  Yeah I removed everything and I ended up with the same feature set as a Nokia C2-01 so I bought one. The only two things I missed (for a bit) was: 1. Email. Turns out people don't have to be replied to instantly and they accept that after a bit. 2. Music. Turns out the C2-01 does a rather good job of this as well after I realised it and stuffed a 4Gb Micro SD in it.
alandarev 12y ago
I find google calendar, navigator, and evernote in my pocket more productive than not having them. Here is the tip, you can disable anything you consider unproductive in the smartphone.
- tomp 12y ago
  Including the large screen and short battery life?
- pling 12y ago
  I find them terribly constricting. If you don't conform to the constraints that are forced upon you by the ecosystem and the device then you are at the mercy of the ecosystem and the device and this is nothing but bad news when you hit a problem or need to do something free-form. I too used Google Calendar, but it's terribly complicated to enter an event in on an Android device accurately, the web interface is clunky and the sync isn't reliable if you're in a poor reception area. Same with evernote and any notetaking software (google keep as well). It's impossible to take notes on the fly quickly without observing the device otherwise you end up listing garbage and missing the stuff going on in front of you. Then occasionally you might find a picture says a thousand words - which you're instantly stuffed with. Your focus is 80% on the machine and 20% on the problem when notetaking on a computer of any description. I carry a little notebook (3 for £1 in Tiger here in the UK) and a mechanical pencil (doesn't need sharpening and has a rubber - Rotring Tikky box of 10 for £11.99 on ebay) for notetaking. As for scheduling, I know what is when (don't underestimate the power of thinking about this rather than contracting it out) and for navigation, I'll scribble out a diagram before I leave of where I'm going. Gotta use that geography GCSE for something. And no you can't disable everything unproductive on a smartphone. I tried it and my device slowly switched all the features back on again. I decided that the following process should apply: 1. Start with what you need. 2. Add what you want. Point 1 turned out to be a dumbphone (calls and SMS) and 2 never materialised.
ASneakyFox 12y ago
I solved this issue by never unmuting my phone. Not even for phone calls (unless im expecting an important call). My phone doesn't tell me when to use it. I do it the other way around. I check my phone maybe 2-3 times a day. When I wake up. Once a little after lunch. And once at night. The main thing you have to do is not feel like its your job to immediatly attend to any contact. Treat your phone like a laptop. Emails you should reapond to in 24 hours. Text or phone calls don't need to be answered. Your phone saves your call logs for your convenience. Just get back to that person when you have a free chance. Our ancestors survived not being able to talk to any one at any moment. We don't have to either.
- jhrrsn 12y ago
  I've been doing this for a while and, while it infuriates some people, I've found it to be very freeing. Mailbox is a great way of dealing with email, and Do Not Disturb lets me allow certain important calls through if I need to. I enjoy the feeling of being in control of my phone, rather than at its mercy!

senthilnayagam 12y ago

don't want to use att

lawl 12y ago

Amazon Fire Phone is Android, just without gapps. I don't quite get the point of this poll tbh.

andybak 12y ago
It's a fork of Android with major differences and no compatibility with Google Services (which to many people is one of the defining characteristics of Android). So you are technically correct but not in a particularly interesting way.
adzicg 12y ago
I bought the Kindle Fire HD tablet as an experiment a few years back, and found it almost useless for my daily tasks. It was OK for watching movies and reading books, but none of the productivity stuff I wanted from an android device was there. Stock Gmail app on android is much better integrated with Gmail than a bare-bones IMAP client (multiple accounts nicely recognised, different sync policies for labels etc), I missed the nice Google calendar integration etc. My business pretty much runs on google apps, so for that use case there is a huge difference between something running android and something running well integrated google services. I assumed getting google apps on Fire would be just a matter of installing, but it would require rooting the device and rebuilding the OS from scratch, which I didn't want to waste time on. I assume Fire phone will have the same issue. It is Android, but Android without Google services is pretty much pointless for me.
kybernetikos 12y ago
These days not having gapps will break a surprising number of apps. I know this because I run cyanogenmod without gapps.

dtrizzle 12y ago

No. Can't do AT&T (hate them). Can't do Android without the play store (no apps).

cjg 12y ago

Given the number of yeses - currently zero versus 131 noes - Amazon hopefully has a different target market in mind.

chmars 12y ago
Relevant is what people do, not what they say … so let's wait for facts.
blueskin_ 12y ago
Given the spec of it, people with more money than sense, but apple already has that market cornered with the iPhone...

AndrewDucker 12y ago

I'll be waiting to see if any of the exclusive stuff is more than a gimmick, or if it's actually useful. And then waiting to see when it's available in the UK.

pibefision 12y ago

No. I don't see why I should move to it.

Kiro 12y ago

Yes, it looks beautiful and I love the UI.

dangero 12y ago

If the Amazon phone follows their Kindle line we will see the price rapidly reduce throughout the year, so I'll be interested to see how that changes the poll. Wouldn't change my opinion. I bought a Kindle Fire gen 1 and ended up hardly using it compared to my iPads, so I'm not very curious about the phone, but still interested in how it will affect other people's opinions.

Lazare 12y ago

No. I like Nexus phones running stock Android, or phones with good, cheap, solid hardware that can easily be rooted and made to run a custom ROM. The Fire Phone is neither; out of the box it's about as far away from the Nexus experience as it's possible to get, and even if it's easy to ROM it, the price they're charging makes that impractical. The Fire Phone will live and die by their ability to find a receptive audience for their weird features; I'm not in that group.

petercooper 12y ago

I'll have to see it before I totally write it off, but the 3D stuff reminds me of the hype around Nintendo's 3D stuff. Yeah, it was cool, looks great, etc, but ultimately not seamless enough to warrant actually using it long term. And then for the rest of it, it's like picking an Amazon tablet over a regular one, I don't want to be locked into their app store, etc.

alien3d 12y ago

No 1. got 4 inchi,7 inchi ,14 inchi..just for development. i think other programmer like me. buy for development testing.

blueskin_ 12y ago

Nope. Looks horrendously expensive and only has average specs, significantly worse than the S5 which will probably be my next phone, and it doesn't have CyanogenMod support, an SD card, or a removable battery; not to mention that as it's amazon it's probably locked down to fuck and exists to sell worthless 'cloud'... I'd rather buy an HTC phone than that, which has all those drawbacks but can still have CyanogenMod installed on it, plus isn't funding Amazon... Oh, and apparently it doesn't have the play store, so it running android is essentially worthless, especially if amazon disabled apk installation in the process of locking you into their services. Fire Phone has to be called that because if you try it, you'll get burnt.

encoderer 12y ago

I wish I could find a poll like this for the iPhone in 2007. It had no carrier subsidies, so was mega expensive. It had no app store, so totally pre the "theres an app for that" phenomena. Corporate IT departments were unfriendly to it. And it didn't offer 3G! Now, I know Apple was able to get away with that because it was inventing the whole category. And that no company, not Apple, nobody, will have the same grace period. (Ask the Palm Pre about that). But I can certainly see some killer UI experiences and awesome integration with Amazon. And honestly I think my wife would consider switching solely for the free photo storage.

blueskin_ 12y ago
Because paying $700 for the privilege of being able to buy more stuff from amazon is really awesome, right? I don't use any such services, but I know google give a lot of free storage. Apple give some too, as do Microsoft, even...

mathnode 12y ago

No. Because my iPhone helps me to be productive. It's not a shopping cart (there's an app for that should I wish).

firePhoneAmazng 12y ago

Yes. I work for Amazon.

amrrs 12y ago
Is that because you'll get it for free?

Htsthbjig 12y ago

No, thank you. I will never use a gatekeeper to access Internet. For me Internet should be a network, not a top down centralized service. Amazon Silk means every single page that you visit is registered by an American company and obviously the NSA. At least when I use a conventional browser, they have to work harder to spy on me.

blueskin_ 12y ago
Interesting - I know nothing about Silk; does it proxy through Amazon servers or similar? If so, yet another reason to never touch this phone. Edit: Even worse, it actually outright renders the page on Amazon's servers. All the privacy violation of proxying with bonus MITM on TLS connections.
- zengr 12y ago
  Yup, you are right: "To minimize latency and page load times, Amazon Silk routes requests through remote proxy servers powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. These cloud servers provide high-performance connection speeds and computing power not normally available to a mobile form factor." http://docs.aws.amazon.com/silk/latest/developerguide/introduction.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/silk/latest/developerguide/introd...
- jgillich 12y ago
  At least on the Kindle Fire tablets, it is possible to disable the proxy.

bowlofpetunias 12y ago

I find any decent phone as good as the next one, all of them offering the handful of features and apps I really use. Which makes my choice of phone more a matter of "lifestyle accessory", and being a sucker for great design, the Fire Phone just seems very plain and "meh" to me.

steviee 12y ago

No.

mrmondo 12y ago

No because Amazon is a company I never want to have anything to do with.

SifJar 12y ago
As opposed to the individuals who produce every other phone? Terrible reasoning, every phone is made by a company.
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  Apple, Microsoft, and Google are hardly paragons of ethical behaviour, sure, but they also aren't Amazon. Not to mention that at least with Android you can install your own ROM, which can be google-free if you want.

nailer 12y ago

I'd buy it for $200 unlocked. $649 is ridiculous. So is the concept of locking.

rweir 12y ago
how much do you think other high-end smartphones actually cost? iphone 5s 32GB: $US749 samsung galaxy s5: ~$us800 etc
- nailer 12y ago
  The Kindle Fire is generally thought of as a mid range smartphone. Comparing to other mid range smartphones: - Moto E is $150: http://observationdeck.io9.com/moto-e-review-1594224578 http://observationdeck.io9.com/moto-e-review-1594224578 - Moto G is $196: http://www.engadget.com/products/motorola/moto/g/ http://www.engadget.com/products/motorola/moto/g/ - Nexus 5 was $349 but has dropped: http://www.theverge.com/products/nexus-5/7422 http://www.theverge.com/products/nexus-5/7422 Amazon typically operate on low margins. The Kindle Fire is designed to sell Amazon services. A loss leader based on followup purchases ala xbox wouldn't be entirely unheard of.

amrrs 12y ago

No. Why on earth would i want NSA and other spygates to watch me 24x7 with 4 cameras (even in night!) #CrazyStuffs!

leorocky 12y ago
This phone is not actually made by the NSA, it's made by Amazon. The NSA doesn't make consumer facing hardware. If you are worried about Amazon being legally obligated to hand over your private information from your phone you would have that same worry with any other private smartphone vendor. I have never heard of smartphone cameras being used to spy on people 24/7 either.
- amrrs 12y ago
  Yes. This is not made by NSA and i'm not saying that this is made for NSA. But ultimately the bigData is going to go there. And i don't worry about Apple because they don't have to find what books i like and when i need an Air cooler, but Amazon needs those information. Either me, never heard of such smartphones tracking user's head and face everytime - so precisely.
  - SifJar 12y ago
    Of course you've never heard of it, they're being "innovative". They need something to differentiate their product from every other phone on the market.

JoshTriplett 12y ago

$649 for a phone with a smaller, lower-resolution screen, an nonstandard fork of Android 4.2, and a fancy sensor gimmick. Definitely not.

CmonDev 12y ago

It is targeted at (potential) Amazon Prime customers. Of which I am not one.

hershel 12y ago

We're probably the last population targeted by this phone. It probably targets seniors or heavy prime users.

zengr 12y ago
Heavy prime users? But why? They are already locked in their ecommerce system. I am sure try are not trying to compete with apple or samsung but want to increase the adoption of amazon.com. Which means they want non prime users to use this phone.
- hershel 12y ago
  Like the author says ,it's a pretty forced explanation, but just to get more money out of them, the excel table shows how much: http://stratechery.com/2014/amazons-whale-strategy/ http://stratechery.com/2014/amazons-whale-strategy/

erikb 12y ago

I think the question is whether they are able to position themselves in a way that people can recognize a real additional value. "For normal smart phone stuff I would use my Android phone. But I really also want to do X and that is something only Amazon does well." I don't think they can provide a real USP that can't be copied by the Android and Apple guys fast, though.

laichzeit0 12y ago

No. I'm not trading the Apple ecosystem for a mere "device". Regardless if it has any slight technical advantages.

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DanBC 12y ago

No. I am going to move to Mozilla and Linux for as much as I can. My sister gave me her old iPhone (a lovely gift!) and I find it somewhat frustrating to use. I'm not sure I trust Amazon to have my telephony information. Also (and I sY this every time I comment in any Amazon thread in the hope that someone sees it and does something about it) Amazon search is hopelessly broken. Often I abandon a search and go somewhere else to buy stuff because sorting and filtering just doesn't work. I am amazed that someone in search hasn't targetted this. Perhaps Algoli can get this?

leorocky 12y ago

I own a Kindle Fire HDX, which is a nice tablet, but really the only reason I own it instead of a regular Android tablet is because Amazon Video is not available on Android. Given that I don't care about video for a tiny phone screen, my answer is a definitive no. The dynamic perspective feature seems like weird UI gimmick. I don't really like head tracking features. I turned that off in my Galaxy S5. Taking a picture of a product is a cool idea, but there's no reason they can't also put that on other phones. Also Amazon never updates their hardware to new versions of the software. I owned the original Kindle Fire and it never got any of the HD or HDX software changes, nothing. Nobody has beaten Apple in this regard, but Android isn't as bad as Amazon's forked version. Finally, the Amazon app store is kind of a desert. I just don't get what they were thinking with this thing. It seems dead on arrival.