“More than seven years after Apple introduced the iPhone, Amazon unveiled the Fire Phone, its first foray into the smartphone market Wednesday at an event in Seattle hosted by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos,” The Chicago Tribune reports.
“It has 4.7-inch HD display, a quad-core 2.2GHz processor and 2GB RAM. It also has a 13 megapixel rear-facing camera with f/2.0 lens,” The Trib reports. “The Fire Phone also featuers a rubberized frame, Gorilla Glass on both sides, CNC aluminum buttons. polished button chamfers.”
The Trib reports, “By introducing a handset, Amazon could more directly push access to its online store, or digital content like music, movies and games, to consumers.”
Read more in the full article here.
“As expected, the device features the much rumored a 3D display,” Chance Miller reports for 9to5Mac. “Amazon released a video teasing the ‘amazing’ device earlier this month, showing customers reacting to the 3D display and how it moved with them. It remains to be seen how many people want a phone with a 3D display, however, especially with previous 3D Android devices never catching on.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Meh. Seven years for that?
So, who can’t wait to trade over 1.5 million apps for 23 that have been ported from iOS to yet another forked Android device?
Hello? Anybody? Pfft.
Just like Google, Amazon is focused on selling other things (content and products for Amazon, ads for Google), not on delighting the user.
Oh, BTW:
Related articles:
Amazon Fire Phone’s Firefly feature: Apple’s iPhone already has it – June 18, 2014
Analyst: Amazon smartphone no threat to Apple’s iPhone, but Android phone makers beware – June 17, 2014
3D screen that moves with them…I wonder how many will get sick?
To be correct, there is nothing 3D about this phone’s display. 9-to-5mac is wrong on this.
It is just accelerometer-aware 2D pictures that change depending on how you move the phone. This has appeared on iPhone in many applications years ago.
After watching some of the coverage videos, I think it’s using a lot more than just the accelerometers to react. I think there may be a few that got sick with the iOS version of the 3D parallax effect that may actually find this one more comfortable. Usually the motion sick feeling comes from the slight millisecond delay between action and the screen reacting that may not be noticeable. It seems that the movement in the Fire device will track your eyes w/o use of the accelerometers giving a less jarring effect. Sort of like walking past a lenticular poster. If you have any examples of those iPhone apps you mention, please share. 🙂
Play with “Fire” you get burned. With all the supposed bells and whistles and malware, they can keep it. I’m confident Apple’s new phone will put out the Fire.
they’ll need to have a fire sale on them within the year…
or sooner if “pants on fire”!
Is it me or does it look like an iPhone 5?
In agreement with MDN, it’s a ‘meh’. No compelling reason to switch even for those who suffer with an Android phone already.
Let’s call it the spyPhone 5 from now on.
I often use my phone in bed, often at funny angles, if what I see is going to depend on how I’m looking at it I can see it getting annoying quickly. Not that I’d consider anything but an iPhone.
Congrats to Amazon for making a phone that nobody will want. Lots of hype and press today, completely forgotten tomorrow.
But they can claim that is their best selling product without ever publishing any numbers even not a shipped numbers. Other droid phone makers now have to race to the bottom cut their profit even further.
The only good news is that more people will give up their old phones and get into smartphone and soon will realize they need a trusted partner and will join the Apple EcoSystem.
I’m surprised Bezos didn’t up the hype factor by declaring that he will deliver all the phones by drone.
People were bitching about the Parallax effect on the iPhone 5 making them feel nauseous, they’ll have lots of fun with this display.
I second MDN-
meh
Does Amazon exist outside of North America?
well, there’s that damn river in South America.
And some type of big women
Yes, it’s not quite a corner shop, just behaves like one.
Not sure what you mean but if you’re asking whether they have operations outside of the US, yes, I believe they have businesses in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain and the United Kingdom.
thanks for taking the time to put them in alphabetical order.
Actually all I did was cut and past from the list on the bottom of any amazon.com page and put commas between. 😛
Their “huge amount of effort into the industrial design” was spent mostly looking at the iPhone for months on end.
The Bilderberg phone!
Should have had a built in dildo.
They should call it the “Fart Phone” since not many will like the smell of it.
Price: $200 on a 2yr contract, exclusive to AT&T
$650-$750 to buy directly from Amazon
DOA
Sound similar to how Apple started in the U.S.
Yeah but Apple started with a revolutionary phone that had no competition. The Firebug is nothing of the sort and is swamped by competitors, chiefly the aforementioned device that still reigns as king.
Yep, a tough battle ahead for users.. But if they and AT&T can pull it off there may be a small vocal slice of FireOS users in the smartphone future. Sort of like the Apple ecosystem in minature but with a much broader market system backing it. Also that Mayday button being a rather popular feature in the Kindle HDX doesn’t hurt.
Actually, virtually nothing like how Apple started with the iPhone. The ONLY thing similar is that the iPhone was originally U.S. & AT&T only. (Something that many, many [most?] said hurt Apple after the first year.)
Just a few of the differences of which I can think immediately:
The iPhone itself was different than almost any other phone on the market at that time. The Fire phone is just one of many, many similar Android phones.
Apple had (and has) a very loyal following that will at least buy one to test it out. Amazon has no such following.
Apple had a popular music store that was immediately usable on the new iPhone. To state that Amazon’s music store is “popular” is laughable.
While not 3rd party developer friendly at the start, Apple rapidly changed to make the iPhone (and iOS) very developer friendly — and end user and developer centric. What experience AT ALL does Amazon have in developer relations with their forked version of Android? How developer friendly is the variant of Android OS in the Kindle Fire?
I can give you the first that the iPhone was different from any other phone at its intro.
The loyal following may not be as large but I understand people that have bought into the FireOS ecosystem are stickier than that for iOS. Maybe less churn is what AT&T expects from this.
Yes, no popular music store. Just a popular site and prior device which everyone can agree is a success for what it was built. A great entry point to access Amazon services. No doubt Amazon would be pleased if the phone exceeds that purpose.
Like the number of Apps in every App Store/marketplace as long as there are enough for people to be satisfied with, it makes increasingly less difference in the quantity. Basically once you reach a certain critical mass adding more apps/developers/etc has little impact in the benefits of the ecosystem to user or developers. Going from “gotta have” to “that’s nice”.
In the process of learning Android development myself and looking at what makes the difference between Google Play and Amazon Apps so I’ll have to get back to you on any experience with Android Dev relations.
Expect a ‘Fire sale’ soon… Amazon will have to give those away for a chance to secure mobile shoppers.
Looks just like yet another clone.
Ok, I can see Amazon selling Kindles so they can sell eBooks. People want one source- if you are (were) unfamiliar with eBooks purchasing a Kindle and then eBooks from Amazon would give piece of mind. Makes sense to take a loss on the hardware and make it up on the content.
Now, a mobile phone? Hum. If companies like Nokia or HTC can’t make a profit why would Amazon risk losing millions subsidizing a phone? What does Amazon get from a phone that it doesn’t get from an ereader? Your location. And where you have been. No thank you.
Constrast this with Apple’s iBeacon strategy: Apple doesn’t need to profit from data ABOUT YOU. They can offer a service and profit from who is sending information TO you.
The ultimate commercial spyphone. Gets data from Amazon’s competitors and from consumers. And with Android on board, Google gets its data share too.
DOA
The Smirk on his face equals to saying = I will sell tons of these POS. SUCKERS! HEHE!
This is a disaster. At half the price, it might have appealed to people who really don’t use the functionality of a smartphone. Never mind that the iphone is clearly more functional, I would buy an HTC One before i would buy this.
Some big takeaways:
1. The scanning capability might be handy, but if you are a storefront retailer, this has to be infuriating. By being able to scan anything, the new Amazon phone expands “show rooming” to a new level. This has already damaged storefront retail tremendously by enticing consumers to use a retail storefront to view merchandise at no cost to Amazon, and then order it online from Amazon instead. Disruptively insidious.
2. Take into account that Amazon controls over 50% of all books sold, both in print and Kindle e-books. By next year, sales of Kindle e-books will past paperbacks. Increasingly, authors are moving away from the traditional publishing model of working with book agents and big publishing houses, and opting instead to SELF-PUBLISH their books. Amazon Kindle Direct allows anyone to upload their book manuscript to be formatted and sold as a Kindle e-book, and you can also print books on demand via Amazon Createspace. These services are completely disrupting publishing as we know it.
So while we fanboys are snickering at today’s announcements, consider that Jeff Bezos is happy to lose money on his new phone. He is locking in customers, disrupting traditional retailers and publishers, and making his money on the back end. It’s a different business model than Apple’s, with a different purpose in mind.
Amazon continues to barely show a profit, something that Wall Street allows, unlike Apple. The Street sees Amazon run in a different way, right or wrong. This allows Amazon to undercut traditional retailers, and slowly destroy main street business as the company builds more distribution warehouses close to major cities.
It’s now not unusual to receive Amazon deliveries on Sundays. What has startled me is that Amazon is keeping the US Postal Service afloat by contracting with them to deliver on weekends and even Sundays, like they do with FedEx and UPS. The power and reach of Amazon is quietly becoming astonishing, and it is happening beneath your feet.
The low prices and convenience of Amazon will come at a price: the storefronts we know and love will be threatened by the Amazon business model. Progress and disruption can be both good and bad. Think long and hard about that. Retailers will have to respond to the challenge laid down by Amazon.
And THAT, dear readers, is what today’s announcements are about. I could care less about their phone. That is not what is important. Instead, consider not what the phone itself can do, but how it will be a means to a larger end for Amazon’s growing market share of retail, distribution might, clout over the vendors and suppliers of products, over publishers, over authors and other business that interact with the giant octopus that Amazon has become. If you are a Rackspace or other cloud ISP and data/server space supplier, you have reason to be afraid.
So keep an eye on Jeff Bezos’s other hand. It’s not the phone that scares me, what what it lets the greater Amazon and its related services do to continue to disrupt a number of industries.
His “other hand” will be holding the remote control for his drones…
Amazon does not need to offer a phone to achieve what u detailed.
It can simply achieve that through software and apps on other platforms !
The money lost on these phones / tablets etc ..could be better utilized in expanding distribution …
That said here is how i see amazon
No profit.. PE 500+. Lol
While destroying profitability and livelihood of countless businesses!
Bozo is nothing more than a megalomaniac ! .
Bezos, being a frequent Bilderberg attendee, has been green-lighted to do whatever he wants to destroy whoever and whatever he wants.
For added perspective, read the insightful posting on LinkedIn by famed venture capitalist Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, “Cabbies and Bookworms Go to War with Uber and Amazon.” Moritz is a very bright man, and whether you agree with him or not, it would be foolish to discount what he has to say. While his topic covers Amazon and its fight with publisher Hachette, when you take into account what Amazon is doing with its new phone, you have to see that the phone is a loss-leader to a broader competitive strategy that threatens traditional book publishing as we know it. Big publishing houses, storefront bookstores, from independents through Barnes and Noble are threatened by Amazon’s website, distribution, ebook publishing and ease of comparison shopping with its apps and new phone.
As others have indicated, the volume of data about your consuming habits will be captured and analyzed as well with Amazon’s vast data centers. The more Amazon knows about you, the more specific its offers will be to you, something no storefront can match. All this is slowly changing your purchasing behavior over time, and you will find yourself shopping more with your phone – iPhone or Amazon Fire – than getting in your car and driving to shop.
Read the article and decide. It’s time well spent. Here’s the link:
https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140617145522-25760-cabbies-and-bookworms-go-to-war-with-uber-and-amazon?trk=tod-home-art-list-large_0
Amazon did not mention battery life. I wonder how many minutes it gets???
According to the Tech Details on the Fire Phone page (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EOE0WKQ/ref=fp_dp_auto_play?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=gateway-center-column&pf_rd_r=0FG9FY7RF9XSBEB3ZP35&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1827797502&pf_rd_i=507846)
“Battery size: 2400mAh. Talk time: up to 22 hours; standby time: up to 285 hours. Video playback: up to 11 hours; audio playback: up to 65 hours.”
May this fire phone burn in hell
Good luck with that…nothing new, Boring. Wait for the next prduct the “Fire Sale”.