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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
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.
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.
I half expect Amazon to acquire Canonical and run Unbuntu.
"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
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.
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.)
Yes, Search and Gmail have gone downhill since they were acquired by Google.
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.