This will be great for people driving and reading a book on their phone with one hand....
Amazon Fire Phone
301–310 of 429 posts
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#302The 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…
It might be a flagship device to attract attention (gimmicky new features for differentiation) and pave the way for lower cost phones. Mayday is a great strategy too, I've always wondered why so few companies go after the tech-illiterate market.
A risk with that strategy is that it may only get you the tech-illiterate market because the other potential customers think your stuff is for idiots and don't want to look stupid.
With Mayday, I think there is another side to that risk: if they only get the market segment of customers who use Mayday a lot, that can get expensive, especially since they promise "Help in 15 seconds or less" (they do weasel out of that a bit by stating that is the goal, but if it comes to a court case, I doubt that will fully absolve them if average response time is, say, 30 seconds)
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it is. Except for people who buy on-contract and don't know better about the pricing and features compared to other phones. Heck, you're even stuck with Amazon's Silk browser... there's no Firefox or Chrome in the Amazon App Store... so most users can forget about syncing this with anything.
You can certainly side load applications so Firefox is not a problem and if you know what you're doing Chrome isn't either. Definitely less than ideal though.
You can, but you have to enable side-loading (most people who buy this phone won't even know what that means) and then you need to worry about it getting out of date. That's a big deal for browsers and not having the app store automatically update you (as it will on Android) to the latest version is a big security risk.
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#304The 3D capability of the phone has a lot of potential in terms of shopping. Imagine not this generation, or the next, but the one after that, being able to just lay the phone down flat and swipe through holograms of different products for sale on Amazon. You could draw your hands outward and that would scale the item. You could flip your thumb like there's an imaginary coin on it and a coin would appear next to the item your shopping for to show scale.
I'm not interested in making any predictions as far as how the phone will fare against Apple and Android, as this is literally a few hours old.
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
iPhone has the build quality though. This is rubber and glass, not metal. There's also a degree of app quality that iOS still has over Android - I'm an Android user: 'Secret', for example, only just came out, and it's very unstable. This is a mid-range smartphone at a premium price.
iPhone has the build quality though. This is rubber and glass, not metal. "Build quality" is such a meaningless term in common usage of smartphones, and speaks to personal subjective aesthetics, not some utility of purpose. And this is all particularly interesting given that there's a good chance a significant part of the new iPhones will be made with plastic. But I'm sure it'll be a "better" plastic.
Rubber objectively ages worse than metal. Glass is objectively more fragile.
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
It didn't turn up in a TESS search (at http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=searchss&state=4802...), perhaps it's an image mark, not words.
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How many consumers do you honestly expect to know, recognize, and understand? Probably around the same number who care that their traffic is going through Amazon first.
I bet if you went and talked to people if they were comfortable with all of their online banking being routed through Amazon...I suspect most would say No. Just a guess. If you put it in terms they understand, they care.
Amazon says HTTPS is not intercepted
https://www.eff.org/2011/october/amazon-fire%E2%80%99s-new-b...
Also, Amazon has most of its customers banking information already.
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Use Amazon Prime to ship you anti-venom in 2 days.
This is one of those instances where you might want to splurge the extra $3.99 to make it overnight. Or else just use their "Subscribe and Save" system on this item.
What if I get bitten on a Saturday?
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#309Earlier 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.
I don't think this perspective is correct regarding to the current different business models these companies have.
Apple: We sell an experience of software and hardware. Google: We sell ads, based on data we gather from our users. Amazon: We sell commodities\services as close as possible to the marginal utility, so we're very competitive.
Altough each of these tech giants are competing, each has quite a different strategy.
As for the Fire phone, I think that Amazon realized that they could deliver an excellent shopping experience from the mobile phone. This would enable massive future growth: Think about going home in the train and buying groceries instead of driving to your nearest Wallmart.
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is false in Amazon's case. Amazon sells you a rake made by a 3rd party who was put into FBA by a wholesaler and makes a reasonable cut of the profit in the process. Amazon has more control but also takes all the blame when things go wrong. Tbh, as someone who works at a business who does both the ads & selling stuff via Amazon as a manufacturer...Google actually makes more money off of us than Amazon does. I don…
When you say 5x, are you considering the acquisition cost for each product sold, or the annual budget? Unless you only sell through Amazon, then a global comparison wouldn't be fair, because Google is semi-monopolist in ads while Amazon is far from it in retail. You should compare your average user acquisition cost with the wholesale margin left to Amazon; eg: how much does it cost to acquire through ads a user that…
> When you say 5x, are you considering the acquisition cost for each product sold, or the annual budget?
When I say 5x, I mean Google gets 5x the amount of money than Amazon does. I think that is more relevant than a "per item" basis.
> Unless you only sell through Amazon, then a global comparison wouldn't be fair, because Google is semi-monopolist in ads while Amazon is far from it in retail.
It isn't my fault Amazon can't sell more of our products. ;)
> You should compare your average user acquisition cost with the wholesale margin left to Amazon; eg: how much does it cost to acquire through ads a user that buys products for $100? And how much of those $100 are left to Amazon?
That is a bad way of comparing for purposes of this conversation.
Amazon has to pay for shipping, pick & pack, customer service, return shipping, etc. That isn't free.