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Amazon Fire Phone

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Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#141
post #62

How does the Mayday on-device tech support work? Amazon expert will appear to help you via live video Will it be a Siri/Cortana like AI agent or a human from a Amazon call center?

They've already got this on the Fire tablets. It's a real person.

Should have called it SnapFire

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#142
post #90
post #69

Sounds like this phone does a good job of solving Amazon's problem of getting customers to buy more from them. I don't see how it makes my life any easier though. 3D? Ok, that is really cool. 2D hasn't really been a limiting factor for me though. One-handed navigation and autoscrolling? Wow, that just sounds terrible. I'm trying to read and my kid bumps my arm. Now where am I on the page? And how do I quickly get bac…

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."

Mayday is cool. I had a kindle fire hd and the power button wouldn't work. The only way to get it to turn on was attach a power cord. I hit the mayday button, the rep talked with me briefly and then auto-ordered a replacement. I didn't have to turn on my computer, I didn't have to dig up a customer service number, I didn't have to sit waiting in a customer service chat (which is usually more like email with the amount of time between responses). Is saving me 10 minutes revolutionary? I'm not sure, but it sure was nice.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#143

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…

> Searching via photos is awesome, but the only use case it seems well suited for is shopping. If I was bitten by a snake, spider, etc. I'd love to be able to snap a picture to quickly identify it and know whether or not to rush to the ER.

I'd probably just use my phone to call 9-1-1.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#144
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…

> 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! Unless I'm wearing mittens, it's never been a problem in ~6 years of smartphone use.

Plus, fine motor skills seem easier with my fingers rather than my whole hand having to learn to tilt in increments. I find that mobile browsing (especially with smaller text on my phone) involves smaller, fine movements that I can't imagine doing by tilting.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#145
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…

This could be on par with the switch from resistive to capacitive touch screens.

It's a smack in Apple's face that they took a feature that iOS 7 had as a utterly useless and distracting gimmick and did something useful and disruptive with it.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#146
post #36

I am always a little skeptical about gestures that involve physically moving or tilting or swivelling the phone. Maybe it works well for others but I find it getting very much in the way when I use my phone in bed, or lying around on the couch, or walking even. On my iPhone 5, I have the screen rotation locked for about 99% of the time.

Remember this is paired with Dynamic Perspective. So maybe we'll see it detects the orientation of your face before deciding on what to do.

That seems like the only way to prevent it from being some kind of torture chamber. Although it still could be, hopefully you can turn it off if necessary.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#147
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…

Everyone's experience is different I guess, but I have never once in my life found myself trying to peer around my own finger. Touching the screen to control where I want information to move is intuitive and precise. Tilting a screen is, for me, very counterintuitive and imprecise. And despite Sergey Brin claiming it's emasculating to touch a screen, I still find the experience a bit magical. Really I don't see the F…

Fingers are very bad for some games, menu-based RPGs for example :) but those weren't good ports to Android.

If there's significant adoption, it could enable some gimmicky gameplay :) (like Nintendo DS) or gimmicky apps.

Maybe one of those turns into a killer feature and we'll see the next gen of smartphones playing catch-up.

It's an interesting gamble.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mayday is actually a killer feature on a phone for Grandma. With 24/7 on-device tech support, relatives would never have to field tech support requests.

But would Grandma really want a phone like this?

You're questioning whether someone wants a phone without easily available support? I'd venture to say if anyone marketed a phone with a 'feature' like that, it wouldn't do well.

Or are you questioning whether a grandmother want's a smart phone? The answer is yes.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#149

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

My guess is, and I'm not trying to be funny, that they are trying to provide an alternative to Apple/Google/Microsoft. They are also trying to make shed-loads of $ € ¥. They don't strictly have their own OS the way those guys do but they plumb Android to remove everything customer facing from Google (App store, music store, book store, browser, ...). I wish them well because I think that the more competition there is the better off the consumer is. As an open-source advocate I feel that anyone building on top of Android is the open-source model working as it should.
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