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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.
Maybe I'm lazy, but even though I'm sure I could root a phone or side-load applications, it's a goddamn phone, I don't want to have to do that to just use it. There is a point where I'm no longer interested in digging under the hood, and that limit seems to be the cell phone for me. Computers, network routers, wireless access points, all stuff to play with, but I just want my phone to be reliable and to do the things that it's touted as being capable of. I don't want to have to modify it to remove the crippleware just to reach intended functionality.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.)