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The Fire phone debacle

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Re: The Fire phone debacle

#181

Post by mreiland »

simonh wrote: post #153
mreiland wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Amazon to death. I have no idea what you mean by "Amazon version of something", but I just purchased an MS ergo keyboard from them a few weeks ago instead of going to best buy. As far as I'm concerned there is no "Amazon version of something", there's simply an amazing service providing so much value that I'm more than happy to wait a few days to get it from Amazon than to buy it retail.

Amazon has their own branded range of products called Amazon Basics.

aha, I wasn't aware of that.

I suppose it's similar to Wal-Mart doing the same thing in the 90's (I think? I'm too old).

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#182

Post by ableal »

zrm wrote: post #148
potatolicious wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on - the biggest (and IMO only truly relevant) reason why the Fire Phone flopped is because it doesn't benefit customers . The Fire Phone wasn't built to be a superior phone, or give customers something truly new and useful. It was built to be an Amazon Content Delivery Device. This is a phone whose primary raison d'etre is to get people to buy more stuff from Amazon. It's a distillation of a platform strategy,…

> Until Amazon starts coming at this with the primary goal of producing a greater, better phone - and the goal of selling more Amazon content a distant second - they will keep failing. The strange thing is that they would have succeeded if they had just adopted their normal strategy. It would be fine if a prominent feature of the phone was that you could take a picture of any barcode on anything and have Amazon ship…

> They should be charging 3%. Low margin is where Amazon eats.

That is disturbingly insightful.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#183

Post by LordHumungous »

greedo wrote: post #162
LordHumungous wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one, its called the Moto G. It comes with near stock Android, it costs $200 without a contract, and I freaking love it. To see the future of cell phones look at the story PC's: prices will fall and quality will become uniformly high- and margins will become razor thin, except for premium brands (aka Apple). This is a tough, tough kind of market for any company to enter.

In what PC world is the quality uniformly high?

Perhaps I should have said that the quality is uniform for a particular price point.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#184

Post by pja »

potatolicious wrote: post #174
pja wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was easily doing ~3 hours of meetings in a given day I just wanted to pull this bit out and highlight it in dancing neon. 3 hours of meetings per day? Not even in a single block? It's astonishing that anything got done at all!

Oh it gets worse . I joined during the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, and my entire department was put on a hiring freeze, despite having plenty to do and legitimate need for more people. So we toiled for two years under a hiring freeze as work piled up - but that wasn't even the biggest problem. As soon as the hiring freeze was eventually lifted, all the managers went nuts with hiring - I suppose in that kind of envi…

Consider my flabber appropriately ghasted. Sounds like getting out was the right move!

I guess those managers had never read the Mythical Man Month?

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#185

Post by soylentcola »

nilkn wrote: post #79
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #78

In my opinion, Amazon should have gone with a generic budget phone to augment their "Amazon Basics" line of dependable, economical cables, USB hubs, and so forth. I would make it a plain, vanilla Nexus-like phone running vanilla Android with no skins and not tied to any contracts or carriers, but priced $50 less than a comparable Nexus 5 or whatever is the current Nexus. Or else, make it about $400 but throw in a yea…

> I would make it a plain, vanilla Nexus-like phone running vanilla Android with no skins and not tied to any contracts or carriers, but priced $50 less than a comparable Nexus 5 or whatever is the current Nexus. Or else, make it about $400 but throw in a year of Prime to sweeten the deal. Maybe add a couple of features to distinguish it, such as a microSD memory expansion port. Forget the lame Amazon AppStore, or at…

Yep. The power button on my Nexus 5 just went up and I had the choice of throwing money at a 14-month-old phone (which is a bit sooner than I had hoped to replace it but old enough that I had to think twice about paying for maintenance) or buying a new phone. Nexus 6 at $650 and in a larger form factor than I would like got me to buy a Moto X instead. $200 cheaper and in a more reasonable size made it the closest thing to a Nexus 5 replacement I ran across.

I would have gladly considered something from Amazon if it had been along the lines of an updated Nexus 5 (under $400, stock or virtually stock like the Moto X) even if, like the Nexus line, it sacrificed a bit of that premium "Cadillac" polish like the wooden back and metal edged frame. Only reason I even bothered with that is because there wasn't a cheaper Nexus that wasn't the year+ old N5.

Hell...don't even bundle gapps if you want to include the Amazon store...just as long as someone can build AOSP for it and I can install it myself.

When the Nexus 7 came out it was roughly equivalent to the Kindle Fire in terms of price and specs but other than fellow Android fans and tech site readers, I didn't know anyone else who bought a Nexus 7. Everyone I knew who wanted an affordable (read: cheaper than an iPad) but functional small tablet bought Kindle Fires so clearly their brand awareness and marketing is worth something if people were willing to buy an slightly inferior device for $50 more.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#186

Post by yellowapple »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #167
ufmace wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that so few other people on this comment thread seem to get it. Google Play and the associated Services ecosystem exists for the sole purpose of forbidding exactly what Amazon is trying to do. Amazon's sole purpose for this phone is as a way to get phone customers into their ecosystem first, and Google's stuff exists to get people on the Google ecosystem first. A first-party device with Google Play and…

Why. Not. Does Google forbid 3rd party app stores on a device with full Google Services installed?

I actually wouldn't be surprised if that were the case. They already don't allow third-party app stores (like Amazon's app store or F-Droid) on the Play Store last I checked; in both cases, you have to enable app installation from "untrusted sources" and download/install the APKs manually.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#187

Post by yellowapple »

rasz_pl wrote: post #155
Max_Mustermann wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone keeps implying there are super cheap super good chinese phones. Is there a site that reviews these or a link where an uninitiated can check the best options out?

there are super cheap phones with okish hardware, but software is universally SHIT, from broken functions, lazy implementations, to malicious rootkits and spyware in factory roms

To expand on this, if the phone isn't particularly well-known, then you'll end up on your own if you want to replace the ROM/firmware with, say, CyanogenMod, since there won't nearly be as much development/porting momentum as there would be for a household-name device.

Re: The Fire phone debacle

#188

Post by Methusalah »

davidw wrote: post #140
qq66 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Kindle Fire tablets are also designed to sell Amazon content, but they benefit the customer with their rock-bottom pricing which the Fire Phone did not have.

I have one of the original Fire tablets, and would not buy another one if not for the express purpose of delivering Amazon content - videos in that case, since the actual reading experience is far superior on a real Kindle. It's not a bad tablet, but not having the Google apps, as well as something relatively close to stock Android, makes it not as useful as it could have been.

It's really worth jailbreaking it, if only for the sake of installing google play.
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