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Amazon Stops Selling Fire Phone
An anonymous reader writes: Last June Amazon announced their Fire Phone, an Android device packed with interesting but questionably useful tech that left reviewers unimpressed. Now, just a few weeks after big layoffs in Amazon's Fire Phone division, the phone has gone out of stock globally and seems unlikely to return. GeekWire says it's "an indication that they've finally exhausted their supply and they don't have plans to manufacture anymore."
...if actually they didn't run out of stock, and they're buried in a landfill next to a bunch of Lisas and Newtons...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Of the firephone
not google? Usuallly you hear about discontinued products from google, not amazon.
ATT only really killed it
The phones would have been dead easy to salvage. The Hardware inside them was great for the price.
All they would need to do would be to update them and actually reflash a stock android OS on them and then have apps that gave them access to the Amazon feature while still giving people all the features of any other android phone, including google play. It would have sold great.
But no one wants to be locked into just amazon (barring those of us who know how to side load), especially if they are trying to upgrade from a previous phone when they can't import their old google purchases and such and have a reduced or delayed release of software and updates due to it.
If they had just reflashed the Amazon Fire to an actual Android OS and then give us extensions to all the Amazon stuff through Apps that couldn't be uninstalled like most other phones have. They would have sold like crazy at the price point they were charging and higher than that.
No one likes Vendor lock-in like that when it can be avoided. It would be like if Samsung tried to make their own modified Android phone that could only get software from a samsung website, none would buy it, even with how popular Samsung is in that market.
I remember that phone! That was supposed to be the Jesus phone! According to the hype, it was supposed to give you a spontaneous orgasm when you opened the packaging! And it would free us all forever and ever from the evil Google hegemony! Somehow I never got around to ordering one and lost track of it after it was released. So... how's that working out for them? ... Oh... wow that went down in flames quickly, didn't it? Let me guess, didn't deliver on the orgasm thing?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Too bad. I have one and i rather like it. It has limitations but for the price it is a nice device. Pros: very good battery life, peppy, nice display, some hardware buttons, can sideload apps, comes with a year of Prime (or extension), integrates well with Fire TV Stick. Cons: Amazon app store is missing many useful apps and lags versions, limited Google integration, could really use a back button (the back gesture ends up doing something else about 25% of the time).
Mind you, i got it for only $159 unlocked, and that includes a year of Prime, so effectively $60 for an unlocked smartphone with a decent processor and display is pretty sweet. For $60, it's a fantastic device, really.
It has some interesting concepts and it isn't a "me too" iPhone & Android. Amazon was stupid as to think the average consumer would pay the same for the fire phone with a non-existent ecosphere as he would for a new iPhone with a rich and featured ecosphere. If they had just taken half the current write-off and put that upfront to sell these phones heavily discounted to get a foothold in the market, I have no doubt they would have sold well.
What does giving away a free year of Prime does? It pretty much traps the person into keeping Prime and buying a ton of stuff from Amazon.
I'm enjoying my fire phone. Would I have purchased one at $600 or $200 + 2 years of service? Hell no. However, when I saw it at $130, and it's been as low as $110, plus a year of Prime I purchased it instantly.
After reading the New York Times article on how Amazon treats it's staff I have made a point to avoid buying anything from Amazon at all. If I could only get it from Amazon, then I no longer need it.
I think it is intrinsic to discourage the kind of workplace that Amazon is creating because it just shows that things really can be a lot worse than they are.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
How can Master Commander Bezos burn off the feet of the unfaithful Amazons who continually annoy his most greatest of exalted of human beings Bezos?
A conundrum for the Greatest of Mathematical and Religious Minds Of The Century!
The Amazon Archbishop doth declare.
Ha ha, ho ho, he he, ah ah
I half expect Amazon to acquire Canonical and run Unbuntu.
If Amazon wanted to establish some bona fides as a phone maker, they could consider creating a pure-Android ROM that takes advantage of the flick gestures and perspective tracking cameras. Not like they have much to lose at this point.
Still on sale on the UK website.
I thought they stopped selling it last July, now would just be a case of stop advertising it.
"Here's your phone. You're Fired! Get it? Making America great again, one belly laugh at a time."
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I admit it. I killed this phone. I'm the commercial kiss-of-death and when I bought one back in January the Fire Phone's fate was sealed.
I just needed a cheap unlocked multi-band GSM phone that I could activate while traveling in Europe. Once I turned off the battery-eating perspective-tracking feature and side-loaded the Google Play store so I could get Google Maps and a few other necessities it wasn't a bad phone -- a little on the chunky side, but a nice enough screen and decent build quality. I'm sure history will record my purchase as the death blow, but the way it came from the factory (with gimmicky battery-killing features of dubious utility turned on and lock-in to Amazon's second-rate app store) surely didn't do it any favors.
Everybody there - really, everybody - knew it was an inevitable train wreck. The environment was one which could not hope to produce success. Articles describing work at Amazon only begin to illustrate what a dystopian shithole that place is. For your children's sake, just boycott these cunts. I know, I know - they're convenient. But it's not worth it.
Aside from that it had a mediocre phone stack, ran a proprietary fork of Android (that wasn't compatible with the ecosystem) and it was tied to Amazon services.
Basically it was just a bad phone.
I don't get this whole "shilling for cows" thing. Is it just a social experiment to see who responds to you? Is there some deep philosophical or political statement you're making here? I suspect there is a subtext that I'm missing other than that you clearly don't approve of cows either.
It's a Fire Sale!
Amazon fired fire phone
not "anymore". Sheesh.
The Fire phone was almost certainly a process of a bunch of executives and engineers sitting in a room and trying to one-up each other for "revolutionary" features. And not once did they apparently take a break to ask some actual consumers if they'd actually find these features useful.
At the time it was released, all it was was some pretty UI enhancements and a bunch of features that did nothing more than make it easier to buy things from Amazon. If they had sold it for a bargain price, I think that, like the Fire tablet, it would have established a decent foothold. But at the price of a "flagship" phone from Apple or Samsung? How on earth was that ever going to work? I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how they figured their silly additional feature set would make it worth being locked into the Amazon ecosystem. (After all, they don't price the Fire tablet like an iPad, so why did they price the Fire phone like an iPhone?)
(None of this really concerns the Kindle Reader, for which tight integration into a store for filling it with books is a really useful feature.)
I bought one of these figuring that it was a cheap unlocked phone with another year of Prime built in. Amazon's biggest failure was building an Android phone without leveraging any of the strengths of Android.
That was just stupid.
If they simply built the phone around stock Android and then added in their "ecosystem" it would have been a worthwhile device.
Why are Americans so useless at writing their own language?
At least it's better than the Golden Girls intro song.
This isn't a full review, but I wanted to mention a few things about the much misaligned "3D useless gimmick."
It isn't a gimmick and it's pretty useful.
Ok first, the "home screen" with 3D icons. Ok, that's a gimmick. But the face tracking goes past that.
There are cool little uses like the status bar not showing unless the user slightly turns the phone. Another is showing extra info that would look cluttered normally. Mainly text labels and such. So you can work with a clean interface but if you need to see the labels, simply slightly turn the phone horizontally and the text shows. It's a neat concept.
There are other HUGE interface concepts like their home screen. It's called the carousel and it's a live "recently used" list that scrolls horizontally. The cool thin is it shows the most recent used or live items under each icon. So you can swipe though the carousel and see recent photos, email, messages, even the menu selections you used on the "Settings" app. It's a smart idea and it much faster than widgets.
Another cool thing is the three screens concept. Each app has three screens; the main center one, the once on the right that show often used items for the app, and the one on the left that shows a menu. A quick flick brings down a "system's quick menu" for things lie airplane mode, flashlight, and such.
It's has a nice camera and firefly.
And to be honest, the 3D lock screens are cool to look at and it's a nice difference to have.
The Fire is in no way worth what Amazon wanted when it was released. But for the $130 I paid, including a years extension of Prime, it's a steal of a deal.
It's a good phone.
...get their phones?
1. It had a expandable memory slot.
2. Had not tried to lock it into an Amazon ecosystem.
Purchased the fire phone for myself and my two kids. They instantly had access to the family collection of Amazon Music, including CD's that we had purchased decades ago that Amazon had transcoded to mp3 for free. They could tell me what they wanted me to get them by adding items on Amazon to their own dedicated wish lists. They had access to email, a generally good phone with decent display, networking functionality battery life, and camera. The only thing wrong with the phone was that it didn't connect to the Google App Store. No big deal..use 1 mobile market for any absolutely must have app that wasn't on the Amazon market place.
Our total cost for three phones was amazingly cheap, roughly $400, for which we received $300 in credits towards amazon prime subscriptions which we have paid every year since the service was first offered. No paying for the following 3 years.
The phone also notifies us when Amazon orders ship, when fedex packages arrive, and doesn't spam us with ads or treat all our information as their product -- Amazon is actually pretty decent with privacy on the phone, as opposed to Apple and Google. I honestly also have no interest in being a subscriber of the Google store or buying any media from Google. Amazon has a much better marketplace for songs, books, and videos...and it gives a great selection of free books, music, and movies with the prime service.
So, sure, if your young with no kids your responsible for and just trying to use the latest android features in the cheapest manner possible - get a google phone. For the rest of us, Amazon actually did a surprisingly good job with the fire.
I don't get this whole "shilling for cows" thing. Is it just a social experiment to see who responds to you? Is there some deep philosophical or political statement you're making here? I suspect there is a subtext that I'm missing other than that you clearly don't approve of cows either.
And here all this time I've been thinking it was the product of a faulty pattern recognition algorithm.
Wir sind geboren, um frei zu sein - Rio Reiser
There. Fixed that. In that they likely weren't really selling...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
You're a cow and a cosmonaut.
you mean, its NOT about copy-on-write?
and, all along, I must have misunderst7!^u';Y63j(%4LLAMA)&mhYk_&
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Between the original Fire tablet looking exactly like the Blackberry PlayBook and the Fire phone looking almost exactly like the Z10, I wouldn't be surprised if they end up just acquiring Blackberry to get back into this business once the price is right.
I planned to buy the Fire phone as my next phone. My Samsung Galaxy S4 is still good so maybe I am a year away from buying. My family has three kindles and Amazon prime and we subscribe to the kids free time. There really isn't another solution for young kids that comes even close.
And my Windows RT tablet.
And my Zune.
And my...
Wait, I don't exist as a person.