Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Fire Phone

amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 429 posts

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#121

Post by asafira »

Zelphyr wrote: post #109
jobu wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has consistently impressed me with their customer service, so Mayday struck me as a pretty awesome feature: "Simply hit the Mayday button in quick actions and an Amazon expert will appear to help you via live video."

I suspect Mayday is targeted more at older users (e.g.; my parents and grandparents). Which is why it doesn't really appeal to me much since, as someone who works in technology, I'm less inclined to need it. Still, you're right that Amazon offers great customer service so I'll give them props for Mayday.

Continuing on that train of thought, I'd guess the "Amazon experts" basically just know the UI pretty well, but they won't help much with questions the hackernews community might have.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#122

Post by epochwolf »

jobu wrote: post #75
JohnTHaller wrote: post #42

From my post in another thread: It's $199 with a 2 year contract with AT&T, meaning it's a $649 phone (now confirmed). It's priced with other 'premium' phones like the iPhone 5S and the Galaxy S5 (both $199 with a 2 year contract, $649 off contract at AT&T). Unfortunately, Amazon's other products like the Kindle Fire are anything but premium hardware and software-wise. On the software side this is partially due to th…

AT&T made significant changes to their plans earlier this year, so buying a 2-year contract from them is now a terrible idea. You're much better using their installment plan or just paying full price for the phone.

Is there a place I can see these plan changes?

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#123

Post by ctdonath »

abc_lisper wrote: post #60

What's amazon angle here? Why are they doing this?

To make it easier to buy stuff from Amazon. Right down to the "press dedicated button, get picture of arbitrary product you're looking at, get Amazon.com product page for it". Just like Apple making a closed ecosystem that deeply persuades users to buy apps from the App Store, music & video from the iTunes Store, store data on iCloud, buy more same-ecosystem devices, etc.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#127

Post by asafira »

nostromo wrote: post #120

The market positioning here seems very un-Amazon. "Your margin is my opportunity" is probably my favorite Bezosism. Given that perspective and Apple's very cushy margins, I expected Amazon not to approach the market with an expensive phone packed with new features, but to approach the market from the bottom, with a good phone that is free or nearly free. The problem, of course, is that Google seems to have that segme…

Why does this seem to be targeted at Android? If anything, I would say the price differential between this and good android phones reflects that it might be more an iphone competitor if anything, and so it seems to be more targeted at Apple.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#128

Post by WalterSear »

drcode wrote: post #59

The compelling feature on this phone everyone's missing: Let's say you have to browse through a bunch of stuff on your phone. The very moment you start doing this, you have a problem: There's a #%&! finger covering up the screen now! The idea behind this phone is simple: All browsing of information is done by tilting the screen, leaving the display completely unobstructed... sure, other phones have tried to do this b…

> However, they were shit, because they didn't involve 4 years of AI research to develop the world's most sophisticated head positioning system ever, like Amazon apparently did.

As someone with some experience with amazon's kindle labs, IMHO, the only accurate part of this statement is that Amazon invested 4 years in it.

Also Bezos isn't focused - he's a micro manager, who is constantly muddling the work of the people he's hired, to ill effect.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#129

Post by justrudd »

reeses wrote: post #57
thrush wrote: post #32

The Amazon Phone seems to capitalize on content consumption of text, audio, video, and the abstract (through purchases). In my mind, this is what the smart phone should be all about.

Well timed after prime music imports your itunes library. no hairy workarounds to replace an iphone in your mac ecosystem, which is something google has not achieved. (yes, other than apps, but that will follow)

For music, I agree. But there is other content - TV shows, Movies, books, etc. My iTunes purchased video aren't going to play on an Amazon Fire unless I remove all the DRM from it.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#130

Post by kllrnohj »

gecko wrote: post #103
kllrnohj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is very important because it's claiming Android app compatibility. What API level it's running is therefore critical information to any developer. Fire OS tends to be more a "skin" than a fork anyway, it's similar to TouchWiz or Sense. The core framework, services, and runtime are all Android.

Well, yes and no. My understanding from talking to the Trello Android team is that Fire OS has a lot of subtle differences in its APIs from the official Google ones, especially around things like mapping and push notifications that otherwise rely on Google services. Sometimes that sounded like it was trivial to work around, and sometimes not, but the overall discussion reminded me more of porting between Windows 3.1…

Mapping and push notifications are both Google Play Services APIs, not Android APIs. So it's not that Amazon forked the APIs as much as the app that implemented those not-platform APIs isn't installed.
Post reply on HN