Fire Phone thoughts
Watched some live blogs on this, and I think it landed about where I thought it would.
I don't think it is a good idea.
Which isn't to say that I think that the product is bad. Given the status of the current smartphone landscape, I simply don't think it is good enough to shake things up. And, in a number of crucial areas it fails to be what it needs to be as well.
On the one hand, to have a new entrant in the smartphone market, it needed to be a device with a premium set of features. And it is. It needed to bring some new life to the cell phone technology. And it does. But then it also needed to be different enough to "break" the current smartphone paradigm, or be cheap enough off contract to pose a real threat to Android. And that is where it fails.
It is still just another new smartphone with a very small set of very niche new features. And those new features come with an early-adopter biting price tag. The thing has 5 cameras with IR to make sure it can track your eyes in any lighting!!!
And, since it is an Amazon device, the low cost element would have been the most important. This device, like others Amazon has promoted in the past revolves a lot of its innovation around tech that makes buying things unrelated to your phone more and pushes its own services as the place to make those payments. Firefly and even to a perhaps heavily overlooked extent its 3D perspective technology do this. And those are arguably the 2 biggest innovations this product has going for it and among the drivers of that premium price.
Firefly is like Shazaam and/or Bing Vision. It is a means of identifying music, videos or even arbitrary products and then enabling you to buy them. Getting this to work consistently and reliably means quality hardware in the mic and camera departments. The 3D perspective tech isn't as obvious. But the value was shown in maps example. Basically, by allowing the user to use "3D gestures" to glance at additional information quickly it enables them to cram more paid services on the screen in a way that doesn't feel like advertising. And as mentioned earlier, to make the eye tracking behind it work, required beefing up the camera tech, which bloated the cost.
All of these things likely bloated the other specs. While the CPU and GPU are nothing to write home about, they are par for the course for higher end phones. The 2GB of RAM is definitely a high-end addition. And if it isn't to power the perspective tech and Firefly, then it was a waste. But no worries, it was definitely there to power the 3D perspective stuff. While it may be specialized, it is not unlike the processing power Kinect requires on the Xbox One, and that means a decent chunk of those specs are going to be dedicated to powering that functionality.
The tech is cool. But ultimately not worth it, to the average high spending consumer, as it means avoiding a trendy iPhone or top of the line Android phone and still paying top dollar to basically get a device that tries to sell you stuff in new and innovative ways.
Amazon's tablets on the other hand were comparatively cheap. You could get a top of the line Amazon tablet for substantially less than an iPad or one of the actually decent Android tablets. And, the kind of content Amazon sells works really on the tablet format.
I see this as having a similar problem to what Windows Phone experienced. They're going to launch against a number of big players, with no apps. This will lead to fewer developers. Which will lead to a more slowly growing app store which will lead to fewer adopters.
Microsoft had two things going for it though. A much bigger, much longer running streak of loyal fans. Yes, Amazon is popular, but when it comes to buying tech, Microsoft is more widely associated. And secondly, Microsoft, when it did produce its own hardware, always produced luxury cost grade items, so, paying a bit more was inline with expectations that their followers would have. Amazon, for as long as they've been in the tech game up until this point has occupied the budget end of the spectrum. To many Amazon fans, the price point (starting at $199 on contract or $650 off contract) will be seen as a betrayal.
I don't think it is a good idea.
Which isn't to say that I think that the product is bad. Given the status of the current smartphone landscape, I simply don't think it is good enough to shake things up. And, in a number of crucial areas it fails to be what it needs to be as well.
On the one hand, to have a new entrant in the smartphone market, it needed to be a device with a premium set of features. And it is. It needed to bring some new life to the cell phone technology. And it does. But then it also needed to be different enough to "break" the current smartphone paradigm, or be cheap enough off contract to pose a real threat to Android. And that is where it fails.
It is still just another new smartphone with a very small set of very niche new features. And those new features come with an early-adopter biting price tag. The thing has 5 cameras with IR to make sure it can track your eyes in any lighting!!!
And, since it is an Amazon device, the low cost element would have been the most important. This device, like others Amazon has promoted in the past revolves a lot of its innovation around tech that makes buying things unrelated to your phone more and pushes its own services as the place to make those payments. Firefly and even to a perhaps heavily overlooked extent its 3D perspective technology do this. And those are arguably the 2 biggest innovations this product has going for it and among the drivers of that premium price.
Firefly is like Shazaam and/or Bing Vision. It is a means of identifying music, videos or even arbitrary products and then enabling you to buy them. Getting this to work consistently and reliably means quality hardware in the mic and camera departments. The 3D perspective tech isn't as obvious. But the value was shown in maps example. Basically, by allowing the user to use "3D gestures" to glance at additional information quickly it enables them to cram more paid services on the screen in a way that doesn't feel like advertising. And as mentioned earlier, to make the eye tracking behind it work, required beefing up the camera tech, which bloated the cost.
All of these things likely bloated the other specs. While the CPU and GPU are nothing to write home about, they are par for the course for higher end phones. The 2GB of RAM is definitely a high-end addition. And if it isn't to power the perspective tech and Firefly, then it was a waste. But no worries, it was definitely there to power the 3D perspective stuff. While it may be specialized, it is not unlike the processing power Kinect requires on the Xbox One, and that means a decent chunk of those specs are going to be dedicated to powering that functionality.
The tech is cool. But ultimately not worth it, to the average high spending consumer, as it means avoiding a trendy iPhone or top of the line Android phone and still paying top dollar to basically get a device that tries to sell you stuff in new and innovative ways.
Amazon's tablets on the other hand were comparatively cheap. You could get a top of the line Amazon tablet for substantially less than an iPad or one of the actually decent Android tablets. And, the kind of content Amazon sells works really on the tablet format.
I see this as having a similar problem to what Windows Phone experienced. They're going to launch against a number of big players, with no apps. This will lead to fewer developers. Which will lead to a more slowly growing app store which will lead to fewer adopters.
Microsoft had two things going for it though. A much bigger, much longer running streak of loyal fans. Yes, Amazon is popular, but when it comes to buying tech, Microsoft is more widely associated. And secondly, Microsoft, when it did produce its own hardware, always produced luxury cost grade items, so, paying a bit more was inline with expectations that their followers would have. Amazon, for as long as they've been in the tech game up until this point has occupied the budget end of the spectrum. To many Amazon fans, the price point (starting at $199 on contract or $650 off contract) will be seen as a betrayal.
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