Amazon Fire Phone
251–260 of 429 posts
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#252The 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…
>> Searching via photos is awesome, but the only use case it seems well suited for is shopping.
So it's useful for the single thing Amazon is most interested in encouraging.
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you can uncheck the "Accelerate page loading" checkbox.
How many consumers do you honestly expect to know, recognize, and understand? I can tell you from experience 0 of the ones I've encountered outside the IT/Startup space were aware of that is what it does.
> 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.
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#254This very much seems like a v1 entry into the market for them. Improving the ease of 3D photos will probably be their biggest focus, as the "take a picture and buy" feature is the key for them being able to eventually reduce the cost.
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#255The 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…
> The problem, of course, is that Google seems to have that segment wrapped up.
No, there's still place for a great, cheap phone that's aimed at the consumer market rather than the geeks or the developers who usually buy Nexus devices.
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#256"One-handed reading" —at last. A phone designed for mobile porn.
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#257From the "About Fire Phone" video: "It's almost like the world is a hyperlink." That right there is gold! That is UX victory and low friction for users in a nutshell.
I can't tell if you're joking or not - personally, I cringed and felt like I was watching an episode of Silicon Valley for much of that video.
Take it both ways at once. That is the essence of reducing friction. Amazon does better at that than at marketing.
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#258The 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…
This could be on par with the switch from resistive to capacitive touch screens. It's a smack in Apple's face that they took a feature that iOS 7 had as a utterly useless and distracting gimmick and did something useful and disruptive with it.
except this may not be either useful or disruptive. Perhaps Apple relegated it to a gimmick because they knew that tying something as fundamental as navigation to it would not work. Just think of all of the people who claimed they got sick from or were simply terribly annoyed by all of the motion in iOS7. Now imagine that this motion is the foundation of your device. Does not sound useful or disruptive to me.
I think Apple's face is blissfully smack-free after this particular announcement
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google sells the technology so that they can sell advertising for third party products. I see this a lot of HN, and I wonder if people are just assuming? To put it into context, I see far more ads on my iPad and iPad Touch than I ever have on my Nexus 5. Outside of the money Google makes from their book, video, and apps stores, they sell the technology to ensure that their services remain viable, and cannot be cut ou…
>They make the platform so Google has less concern about being cut out of the ecosystem. True, but let's not ignore that their core business is selling advertising. Before Android came along that business was at the mercy of Apple (in the mobile space anyway). >I mean we see the paradox on here constantly where people will gloat about how much more valuable iOS users are to advertisers, but then that Android is a pla…
Google's core business is making services that people like to use. That they monetize some of those services via advertisements is a function of the industry that they operate in: There was no market for a pay search engine, or even a pay consumer mail provider: Those genres had long been supported by ads, and users expected that. Anything else was a non-starter.
Re: Amazon Fire Phone
#260The 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…
Prime customers are Amazon's highest spending customers. They, according to this report[1], spend more than 2x what non-Prime customers spend - $1340 / year. Prime customers aren't likely to be swayed by a low-cost, budget phone. So it makes sense for them to tie their premium Fire Phone to this segment of their customer base. This also doesn't mean they can't do a budget phone later. [1] http://bgr.com/2013/12/17/am…
Only one data point, but I'm a Prime customer that spends significantly more than $1340 a year on Amazon and I have a Nexus 5 which costs just a little more than half what this Amazon phone costs.
I don't need a "budget" phone, I can afford something much higher-end; but I still like to get value for price and in the face of the Nexus 5, the Moto G, the Moto E or the Lumia 635 all of which cost half or even less than a quarter of the price of the the Amazon Fire phone, it just doesn't look like a good value to me.
YMMV if the 3D perspective thing is that appealing to you, or you want a cellphone with a relatively very good camera, but neither of these are particularly important to me.