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

111–120 of 429 posts

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#111

Post by rayiner »

drcode wrote: post #86
__david__ wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't really seem compelling to me. I've never felt the problem of having my finger in the way while scrolling, and I'm pretty dubious of tilt scrolling. I'll reserve final judgement until I've had my hands on the phone or seen other people's hands on reviews, but right now this really seems like a solution in search of a problem.

My hypothesis is that adding this feature to a 4.7 inch device has the potential to make the user experience equivalent to maybe a 6.7 inch device, because a finger covers up the equivalent of 2 inches worth of screen real-estate. Wouldn't you like a 6.7 inch phone that only takes 4.7 inches of space in your pocket? (That said, only time will tell if I am right)

Do you keep your finger on your phone while reading a page? I flick, read, flick, read, etc.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#112

Post by toddmorey »

ultimoo wrote: 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.

I think the subtle tilt-to-scroll paradigm, if it works well, could become widely adopted. It seems to make one-handed scrolling much more approachable without any fingers obscuring content.

Question: Does it seem like it requires the camera system to make it usable or could it be done reliably with just the accelerometers now common in smart phones?

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#113

Post by jbigelow76 »

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…

Didn't Samsung already try to address the "finger issue" (which has never been a problem myself or anyone I know of complaining about) with their scrolling via eye tracking, which turned out to be a nothing more than a gimmicky battery slayer?

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#114

Post by mbreese »

stevenguichard wrote: post #99
Zelphyr wrote: 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…

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?

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#115

Post by ChuckMcM »

Ok, that is pretty neat. There seems to be a lot of interesting innovation here that Google just sort of missed. (in particular the orientation aspect of accessing alternate views, which could be very powerful if done well).

In some ways it seems like Amazon is disproving my theory that if you open source a big chunk of code that is ok because your level of expertise with the code will always insure you can out execute folks who are not the 'originators.' But that doesn't seem to be the case with Amazon here.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#116

Post by revscat »

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…

> There's a #%&! finger covering up the screen now!

At which point I use the abductor pollicis brevis, adductor pollicis, etc. to do something quite amazing: I move my thumb out of the way. Alternatively, I can use the same muscles to scroll the screen to a point such that I can see any obstructed content.

The benefit of this method is that I maintain my original viewing angle. I also have finer motor skills in my thumb than in my wrist, and thus I suspect I have greater control.

(FYI: Might want to tone it down a bit. You sound like an astroturfer.)

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#117

Post by evilduck »

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…

I'm taking the opposite stance, this is a stupid gimmick until proven otherwise. Scrolling with my finger can happen on the very edge of the screen or area of interaction and it's easy to move out of viewing obstruction.

Tilt-based interaction has existed for years on iOS and Android using the accelerometers. It's not a responsiveness or tracking issue, it's that interacting with screens at oblique angles is annoying and many times tilt/rotation interactions require pretty large arm movements compared to finger movements, limiting when and where they're useful. Maybe Amazon made it so amazing these can be overlooked or they were solved, but I'm not buying into the idea just because it uses cool computer vision technology.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#118

Post by asafira »

moe wrote: post #71

I wonder how the hardware (esp. camera) compares to the other high-end androids and whether you can run stock android on it.

I'm convinced it's actually a very hard problem. Cameras on android have been subpar across the board for years now, but it's a feature everyone looks for in a smartphone. There's no way manufacturers aren't dedicating some focus on them but just not succeeding much yet.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#119

Post by tolmasky »

Zelphyr wrote: 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…

Perhaps my consumer lifestyle strangely aligns Amazon's incentives with mine, but I'm actually really happy how they solved the problem of me buying more stuff from them. It seems that they observed very common patterns people already use poorly and streamlined them.

Case in point, almost everyone I know takes pictures of books and items they want to buy or investigate further later. Currently this 1) clutters my Photos app with this overloaded behavior and 2) additionally requires me to then manually re-enter the information/remember to look it up. Just having Amazon scan and put it on some list for me is killer in my opinion.

Additionally, I've wanted something like X-Ray for so long and it seems so obvious. Shazam style movie/tv show detection and bringing up IMDB and other useful info on my phone is great. Having Airplay style functionality built into Samsung TVs and play stations is also great (hopefully we will move to a standard protocol to stream video content to TVs in the near future, but this is a positive step in my opinion from just Apple TV in Apple land and just Amazon TV in Amazon land).

I think Mayday may just be the feature though. People like me will have no use for it, but its definitely the case that most people don't really know what they're doing at all with their devices. The threshold for "user friendly" is so laughable right now. iOS AND Android really are quite complex for any non-standard task ("What does it mean I've run out of iCloud space??"). And this is not easily implementable I think -- it will take serious investment to copy this feature on other platforms, you can't get away with a half-baked software solution.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#120

Post by nostromo »

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 segment wrapped up.

Instead of competing with the iPhone, this seems to more targeted at Android -- only priced uncompetitively.

The features themselves seem slightly gimmicky. I tend not to want to move my phone physically as a way to interact with apps. (Doing that figure "8" when my GPS goes out for some reason is incredibly awkward.) Searching via photos is awesome, but the only use case it seems well suited for is shopping. The built-in Genius Bar is cool, but it seems targeted toward smartphone noobs, which is oddly coupled with features targeted to smartphone pros.

If I'm reading the tea leaves correctly, this will probably be a novelty, like Windows Phone, for a while to come.

Post reply on HN