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Amazon Fire Phone

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Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#191

"Great phone for reading?" If they really cared about the reading experience, they would have put an AMOLED screen on it. AMOLED screens are far superior for night-time reading, which is when most people do their reading.

Agree - he said they were "lavish" in their attention to make it a good phone for reading and I'm like how much can you actually do? It's a 4.7 inch 720p LCD, there's your reading experience. Reading on a phone plain sucks for anything more than a couple articles. Autoscroll doesn't float my boat either.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#192
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That is fine for the occasional bite, but what if I plan on being bitten regularly?

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#193
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting I think... iPad: Kindle Fire, Nexus 7 Apple TV: Kindle Fire TV, Chromecast iTunes: Amazon Prime Streaming TV + now music, Google Play iPhone: Kindle Fire Phone, Nexus 4 I think they're all playing for the same territory. The big difference seems to be that Apple really only sells the technology. Google sells the technology so that they can sell advertising for third party products. Amazon has the…

You make a good point: Apple: Sell at high price, modest tie-in revenue. Google: Sell at low price, modest tie-in revenue. Amazon: Sell at low price, high tie-in revenue. It does seem like Amazon is bound to win in the long run, based on pure economics, if this trend continues.

Except it isn't being sold at a low price, and doesn't really offer anything valuable to the customer that differentiates it from the competition. The implicit deal was always the product is sold at cost so they can encourage sales on the store, why would anyone pay full price for this?

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#194

This phone will find a market amongst amazon addicts. While not bleeding edge, specs are somewhat solid[0]. However what set Kindle Fire apart from competition and allowed it to gain foothold in the market was competitive pricing, I see none of that here. Amazon is obviously making a bet that software they are shipping with the phone will be a killer feature that will overcome the shortcomings, I do not think broader…

Amazon is obviously making a bet that software they are shipping with the phone will be a killer feature, I do not think broader market will agree.

If the barriers to get users to spend money are lower on Amazon's phone, then this is exactly the right move to capture developer and content producer mindshare for their ecosystem!

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#196
post #55
post #7

This seems compelling if you're already sold on the Amazon ecosystem, but not terribly so if you're not -- especially at that price.

As an iPhone user, I already have access to the important parts of the Amazon ecosystem (books, music, movies, TV shows). But I have a superior app store. The only big feature I think could prove important is their live-chat help.

X-ray is really cool. Imagine if you were watching a video on your iPad and decided you wanted to see more information about one of the actors on screen. With X-Ray you can click on their face and it'll automatically bring up their IMDB info. This is a really cool integration that is lacking in competing devices.

I'm not saying things like that make up for the inferior app store, just that it's really cool.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#197
post #28

Kinda unfortunate for Firefox OS guys. Amazon's Fire Phone OS is called Fire OS... definitely gonna confuse some folks...

Sounds like a trademark case waiting to happen but looking it seems neither "firefox os" nor "fire os" is trademarked in EU or US.

Firefox OS is trademarked with the USPTO. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/list/

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#198
All the effort and cost behind physical and software interaction innovations but not a hint of speech interaction/recognition. Did they cripple 'Ok Google', Voice Search from their Android fork as well?

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#199
All of the features they demoed in that video seem pretty gimmicky at best. The kind of stuff that you show off once in a while, but never actually use. Tilt to scroll sounds like it would be maddeningly imprecise compared to finger scrolling. With so many functions apparently tied to various gestures, it seems like you better be real careful using this phone when doing anything but sitting still and devoting your full attention to it.

Meanwhile, where's email, photography, calendering, web browsing, contact management and sync? Who's their map data provider? You know, all of the stuff that you actually depend on a phone to have day to day?

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