Amazon announces 3D Fire Phone

[Redondo]

 

 

Amazon announces 3D Fire Phone at Seattle event

CEO Jeff Bezos introduced the phone, which has a 3D display called Dynamic Perspective.

 

Amazon is launching its own smartphone. The new phone, called the Fire Phone, will ship July 25 and cost $199 on a two-year contract. It’s available for preorder now.

 

The phone’s most visible feature is its 3D display, called Dynamic Perspective. The Fire Phone has four user-facing infrared cameras that it uses to gauge the location of your face and eyes. As you move in relation to the phone, the image shifts on the screen to give you the convincing illusion that the interface or object you’re viewing has depth and layers.

 

 

 

[Redondo]

 

[Chimi]

Only available on AT&T.  It's 2014.  Make your phone accessible to everyone if you plan on being a competitor in the market.

[Tank]

seems like a big giant gimmick.

[Make Angels Great Again]

Unless it runs iOS or Android, it'll fail.

 

Lack of developer support is the biggest killer in the smartphone market. And all the developer support goes to those two OSs. If it weren't for lack of developer support I never would've ditched my windows phone. 

[red321]

As someone who had one of the original kindle fire's...amazon does a good job in building products that make it really easy to buy stuff from amazon. Oh, this looks good...click...click...I think I have a backlog of 30 books.

 

Are people really looking for a handheld shopping all the time device?

[nate]

Yawn

[Jobu]

Unless it runs iOS or Android, it'll fail.

Lack of developer support is the biggest killer in the smartphone market. And all the developer support goes to those two OSs. If it weren't for lack of developer support I never would've ditched my windows phone.

Fire OS is a forked version of Android. Their app store is mostly republished Android apps.

[RallyMo]

Fire OS is a forked version of Android. Their app store is mostly republished Android apps.

It's Android, but for stupid people.

[Taylor]

It's Android, but for stupid people.

 

So basically an iPhone?

[Jobu]

It's Android, but for stupid people.

That's a lucrative market.

[RallyMo]

That's a lucrative market.

Agreed.

[Thomas]

It's Android, but for stupid people.

 

The one advantage to the Amazon app store is it is more practical to share your apps across multiple devices in your family than Google Play.

[Thomas]

As someone who had one of the original kindle fire's...amazon does a good job in building products that make it really easy to buy stuff from amazon. Oh, this looks good...click...click...I think I have a backlog of 30 books.

 

Are people really looking for a handheld shopping all the time device?

 

I guess it makes sense if you fully adapt to the Amazon ecosystem and have not only a Kindle phone but a Kindle tablet and a Kindle Fire TV.

[RallyMo]

The one advantage to the Amazon app store is it is more practical to share your apps across multiple devices in your family than Google Play.

 

I managed to do it by setting up a gmail account that we use exclusively for app purchases.

[red321]

I guess it makes sense if you fully adapt to the Amazon ecosystem and have not only a Kindle phone but a Kindle tablet and a Kindle Fire TV.

 

There are certain areas the Amazon ecosystem makes sense. The Amazon cloud/music service is much better than iTunes, even on Apple products. I can buy an album and have it instantly available on multiple devices - pc, mac laptop, windows laptop, iphone, and kindle fire (and it syncs to iTunes and then uploads to the crappy iTunes Cloud service). Albums are usually cheaper as well, sometimes by almost half. The new Prime Music service has a lot of value as well, of course I'm speaking as someone who doesn't listen to a lot of current top 100 and that type of crap. Haven't really looked at their old blues/jazz stable, but so far I've found a lot of interesting albums available for my listening pleasure.

 

Same thing on books, price wise they are routinely better than other ebook retailers, and I can share books/sync across multiple devices. I can go from reading through the kindle app on the iphone on the shitter at work and pick up where I left off on the kindle fire when I go to bed at night.

 

I'm not familiar with the Google Play environment. I do know when I look at Google Music a year or so ago it left a lot to be desired.

Edited June 23, 2014 by red321

[Tank]

There are certain areas the Amazon ecosystem makes sense. The Amazon cloud/music service is much better than iTunes, even on Apple products. I can buy an album and have it instantly available on multiple devices - pc, mac laptop, windows laptop, iphone, and kindle fire (and it syncs to iTunes and then uploads to the crappy iTunes Cloud service). Albums are usually cheaper as well, sometimes by almost half. The new Prime Music service has a lot of value as well, of course I'm speaking as someone who doesn't listen to a lot of current top 100 and that type of crap. Haven't really looked at their old blues/jazz stable, but so far I've found a lot of interesting albums available for my listening pleasure.

 

Same thing on books, price wise they are routinely better than other ebook retailers, and I can share books/sync across multiple devices. I can go from reading through the kindle app on the iphone on the shitter at work and pick up where I left off on the kindle fire when I go to bed at night.

 

I'm not familiar with the Google Play environment. I do know when I look at Google Music a year or so ago it left a lot to be desired.

 

aside from the price issue, everything you described here is identical to what i can do with my iPhone, iPad, and macbook.

[Blarg]

Yes but it costs half as much to tether your life to Amazon. So live in your snooty iChains while the free world wears golden Kindle handcuffs.

[red321]

aside from the price issue, everything you described here is identical to what i can do with my iPhone, iPad, and macbook.

 

The difference is, it appears to actually work as compared to iCloud. We just went and disabled iTunes Match on all of our phones because it was slowly eating up storage on 3 iPhones and 1 iPad. Turn the phone on...5gb available space, 24 hours later (no listening to music)...no space.

[red321]

i'd say the chances of me getting an iphone are about 1 in 100.

 

the chances of getting an amazon whatever phones are 1 in 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

 

So, you're saying there's a chance....

[red321]

i'm an old man, and still use my iPod 128 GB for all things music.  it's held up for me for nearly 7 years, and i never snyc anything on it.  just treat it like an mp3 player, really.  music is just not something i ever care to use my phone for, though i do use amazon's droid app a lot for music now, i must admit.  

 

I still have an iPod I use, 160gb model I think. We primarily use it for backpacking or camping. One area a phone cannot compete with is taking a large music library with you.

[Jobu]

I still have an iPod I use, 160gb model I think. We primarily use it for backpacking or camping. One area a phone cannot compete with is taking a large music library with you.

Newer phones are supporting 128gb microsd cards. That's 3x the size of my library, and certainly approaching standalone device capacity.

[Tank]

i'm an old man, and still use my iPod 128 GB for all things music.  it's held up for me for nearly 7 years, and i never snyc anything on it.  just treat it like an mp3 player, really.  music is just not something i ever care to use my phone for, though i do use amazon's droid app a lot for music now, i must admit.  

 

i just bought a new car. it comes with a plug in (a small rca plug) that connects to my phone so i can play my music directly from my phone through the car stereo. loved it as we made a long trip to norcal this weekend and had plenty of music to listen to. this was especially helpful since the CD player wouldn't accept all of the CDs i tried to put in the player.

 

i have an iPod that needs to be updated, but the small rca plug should work just fine with it, too. it's a great way to always have my music with me, especially for long trip car trips.