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Amazon Fire Phone

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Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#151

Post by Zelphyr »

mbreese wrote: post #114
stevenguichard wrote: post #99

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?

If the original (non-Fire) Kindle is any indication; no. I gave mine a pre-Paperwhite Kindle and she loved it. Then someone bought her a Kindle Fire ("If you like that you'll LOVE this. You can play games!"). She hated it and went back to the regular Kindle.

Turns out, if she wants to play games she'll grab a deck of cards.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#152

Post by NDizzle »

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 was thinking the same thing. Yet another product that I can't use for couch surfing.

More people need to copy the old HP stuff where you used the bezel for navigation and commands.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#153

Post by mgkimsal »

asafira wrote: post #121
Zelphyr wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect Mayday is targeted more at older users (e.g.; my parents and grandparents). Which is why it doesn't really appeal to me much since, as someone who works in technology, I'm less inclined to need it. Still, you're right that Amazon offers great customer service so I'll give them props for Mayday.

Continuing on that train of thought, I'd guess the "Amazon experts" basically just know the UI pretty well, but they won't help much with questions the hackernews community might have.

they might not right now, but presumably all calls will be recorded for quality assurance purposes. they'll assemble a list of all questions people have, at all levels, and can improve at all levels as well.

Apple's essentially owned 'end to end' for a while - they design the chips and hardware, the physical retail stores, and handle customer support. The amount of info they have on problems people have and how to optimize for that must be huge. Amazon getting in on direct customer interaction for support will give them a similar, yet different, potential usability goldmine for years to come.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#154

Post by JoeAltmaier »

Holbein wrote: post #139

Both the object detection and that 3D tracking seems to be focused on consumption. Consume more movies, more music, more books, more apps! How sad. A phone is the most intimate piece of technology we have, and all Amazon can think about making it a machine of consumption. I wish they would have focused more enabling people to create things. You know, help them be active. Help change the world. There's just a slight h…

Amazon can't make folks do anything. So they have to concentrate on what makes money. They can sell features to developers as ways to make more money, thus making their phone more desirable. Those are the creative folks anyway. So Amazon enables them, and makes a buck too.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#155

Post by GFischer »

acchow wrote: post #95
derekp7 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk about losing your place -- I just want a phone that I can hand to someone when I'm showing a picture, and not have it exit the app or something when they inevitably touch the screen. Would be nice to have a touch screen lock gesture, which keeps the current app active and displayed. Oh, and the 3D -- is that really a 3D screen, or does it just change the screen when you move the phone, based on the position of y…

Soft buttons drive me crazy. When I hand my Android phone to someone to help me take a picture, about half the time they inadvertently close the camera app.

You're not the only one. I'm very close to giving up and using an Android phone as my main phone, but I love physical buttons.

The most painful one is the camera button, it's the one killer feature of Nokia phones and Windows Phone.

(I have a Nokia N86 currently as my main phone).

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#156

Post by georgemcbay »

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…

Sorry to pile on here, but this is not a real problem for me and as someone who is 6'2" with hands to match, someone would seem to have to be really fat fingered for this to be an issue; plus tilt scrolling is worthless in one of the primary contexts I use my phone, which is mounted to my dashboard as a GPS/hands-free unit.

I bought a Nexus 5 this year and kind of pre-regretted it because I thought I should wait to see what Amazon came out with when they announced their long-rumored phone, but now I feel great about it. None of the much touted features here are really things I care about, though I get that my perspective is not universal (eg. Mayday might be great for my mom(1), but not useful for me. Ditto unlimited cloud storage, I already need a long term solution for the images I take with my Canon 70D and Sony A7 cameras, having something that is unlimited only for the small set of cellphone camera photos I take isn't useful for me; YMMV if all you use to take photos is your cellphone, but even in that case I would be reluctant to tie myself to Amazon in that way since it becomes a friction point to upgrading to a different kind of phone in the future).

The glass back doesn't help things either; I learned that lesson with the Nexus 4 -- never again. And lastly the price isn't very attractive in the recent world of inexpensive but powerful Android phones, especially when you're tied to AT&T.

(1) [except for the fact that the most likely big problem someone like her would run into is not being able to connect to the network in the first place, which is obviously not a problem Mayday is well equipped to help with]

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#157

Post by fudged71 »

cory123444 wrote: post #26
infinite_beam wrote: post #9

Bezos did not talk about the basic phone functionality of call/text.

Those should just be expected to work.

Or the texting capabilities are in fact sub-par. Both Apple and Google have had to double down on messaging UX/functionality because they are used so much, plus Facebook, Whatsapp, and Snapchat.

Messaging is really important.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#158

Post by stonogo »

smegel wrote: post #125

No Youtube in list of apps...interesting. Not cheap either...

none of the kindle fires have a youtube app either. you browse the youtube mobile site and the videos play in the default media player.

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#159

Post by VikingCoder »

/sigh

I really wish Amazon would just make all of their obviously Android devices into actual, Google-approved Android devices. Google Apps and all. I get that they want their own market for apps, etc. But yuck.

Also, I wish things like Amazon Movies would just stinkin work on Android devices, like a normal app. I mean, come on... I have like 6 Android devices, 1 Kindle Fire, 1 TiVo, and 1 Roku. Why are the 6 Android devices left behind? Ug.

/whine

Re: Amazon Fire Phone

#160

Post by jonknee »

opendais wrote: post #89
JohnTHaller wrote: post #70

Earlier 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.

Aka the MitM browser. http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/09/28/amazon-kindle-fir...

Or you can uncheck the "Accelerate page loading" checkbox.
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