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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
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.
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.
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.
I half expect Amazon to acquire Canonical and run Unbuntu.
This article is pure nonsense (and yes, I work at Amazon). We're not crying at our desks - we have special rooms for that, for FSM's sake!
That being said, I think I've seen only one person with a FirePhone at _Amazon_. That's how popular they are...
I was in the process of a multi-month (sigh) email dialog with an amazon (labs) recruiter; before the big article, things were coming along and there was interest from him (and his group) in me. after the layoff/reorg/article, a few weeks went by and nothing.
then, an email saying that they are 'regrouping' and would I like to apply for an android oriented job instead of the hw/fw job that I was more interested in. I gave him a good earfull about how amazon has no business (literally and figuratively) being in the android space, no one buys it, its a failure and fwiw, I have no background or interest in the race-to-the-bottom known as 'apps development' or even the o/s itself. hardware, sure, I'd be into it, but the android stuff at amazon is just a non-starter and everyone knows it.
of course, once I leveled with him, I don't expect to ever hear back from him again. in fact, he may even be RIF'd for all I know.
but I do know that amazon has to exit the android biz and spend its money elsewhere. they have a lot of power in the brand name (amazon) but android is just not the place for them, imho.
(I was actually pushing some new hardware ideas on a totally non-phone CES concept; and initially the recruiter was excited about it; but now I'm not hearing from him at all. I guess amazon really has fundamental problems that are more than just skin deep...)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
"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.