Amazon Fire: The Phone That Makes You a Star
Amazon took its time in launching the Fire phone, and it shows. Where you might expect a device carelessly thrown together to capitalize on the popularity of the Kindle Fire tablets, you instead find a remarkably well-designed piece of technology. And it's fun to use, too.
Even without its fancy marquee features, the Fire phone is an odd duck. It's the first and only phone to run Amazon's forked version of Android, Fire OS. Yet Amazon's smartphone experience doesn't feel anything like a 1.0. The company has learned a thing or two about user experience from its Kindle Fire tablets, and it shows in the Fire phone.
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Animations, for instance, are fast and buttery-smooth. The display responds fluidly to touch almost all the time — the hallmark of a fast processor optimized for a specific device. Even the phone's dialogue boxes have a nicely textured design.
But all those are just consequences of Amazon's clear goal here: Design a phone that people will want to immerse themselves in. Everything about the Fire phone is designed to catch your eye, hold your attention and reward you for … doing anything, really.
The approach may feel very Apple-like, but the implementation is entirely different. The Fire phone is really like no other smartphone that's come before it … partly because of interesting technological tricks, and partly because of the laser-like focus on Amazon customers and services.
Hybrid theory
The software may resemble Android, but the Fire phone's design clearly took a few cues from Apple. The flat black slab with rounded corners looks a lot like an iPhone at a distance, and the glass back is similar to the iPhone 4/4S. However, the tiny slab of a home button hints at the Android DNA within. As Mashable's creative visual storyteller Jeff Petriello puts it, "It looks like an iPhone and an Android had a baby."
The Fire phone's 4.7-inch display feels just right, confirming that Motorola was onto something when it settled on that size for the Moto X — it's about as big as you can get and still comfortably operate with one hand. The 1,280 x 720 resolution results in a very crisp 312 pixels per inch (ppi). Plenty of phones go higher, of course, but with little benefit.
You can only get Amazon Fire from AT&T for now, and it costs $199.99 (for 32GB) with a two-year contract (you can also get it contract-free under AT&T's Next program which divides the cost into monthly payments). The device currently lacks Bluetooth 4.0, so don't buy Fire if you want to use it with a wearable, but the radio is there, so a software update may unlock those features.
The fundamental UI of the Fire phone is similar to Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets: There's a strip of humongous app icons that you can scroll through horizontally, with the most recent content from each app listed underneath. A smaller home row of apps (phone, messages, email and web browser) sits along the bottom.
Being a quasi-Android phone, most apps feel like their Android counterparts ... until you start looking for the back button. There isn't one; to go back, you swipe up from the bottom of the screen. If you missed this tip in the initial tutorial, however, you might find yourself helplessly trapped in an album of your friend's Facebook profile pictures, with no way to escape without closing the app.
The phone that watches you
Look at the Fire phone for more than a few seconds, and the first thing you'll notice are the four tiny circles in every corner of the front panel. Each one is a camera paired with an infrared sensor, and they provide the magic behind the Fire phone’s “Dynamic Perspective”feature.
Dynamic Perspective is the simulated 3D effect where the images on the phone move with your eye. The four cameras are constantly scanning your face, looking at you as you look at the phone. Turn to the right, and an image or icon will tilt left; turn left, it'll turn right.
Only images and apps made to work with Dynamic Perspective — such as the custom lock-screen backgrounds — will respond in this way, although Amazon has opened the feature up to developers, and the first games to use it are available now. The feature even extends to basic UI features, including the home screen, app icons — even text in menus.
The effect, which works for anyone looking at the phone and requires zero setup, is really more of a trick than a feature. However, I like the philosophy behind Dynamic Perspective, which essentially shines a spotlight on the customer.
When it comes to the Fire phone, you're the star of your smartphone experience, and everything on the phone reacts to you.
It's certainly a bit eerie at times; with the phone sitting face-up on my desk, I realized it would make the status bar visible whenever I'd look at it. But there's also a refreshing honesty with a phone that "looks" at you. In the context of the neverending privacy vs. convenience conflict, the Fire phone's Dynamic Perspective is a continual reminder that our devices are a window that either side can look through.
That's not to say the feature violates privacy in any way, of course. It's really just some visual candy, and it's easy enough to turn off. It's also a bit buggy — I quickly discovered that allowing app logins for Lastpass inadvertently disabled Dynamic Perspective. But I'm sure quirks like that will be fixed quickly with software updates.
If Dynamic Perspective has any benefit, it's in the scrolling. When you're reading an article in Amazon's Silk browser, you can scroll the text by tilting the phone backward. You can slow it down, or even reverse it, by adjusting the angle. It really works well — Amazon chose a appropriately extreme angle to start the scroll, so it's hard to accidentally activate.
If you like the idea of giving your thumb a break from scrolling, you'll love the the Fire phone's gestures. The Fire phone's UI is centered around three screens: The app's content (in the middle), the navigation menu (on the left) and "extras" (on the right). You get to the nav and the extras by either tilting the phone left and right, or just swiping from the edge of the screen.
This kind of gesture-based UI is a subway commuter's dream: You can hold the phone in one hand and navigate apps without stretching your thumb or resorting to two-handed operation. As much as I like the HTC One M8, it's a little big to comfortably use while holding onto a pole, carrying a drink, or holding a sleeping child.
Firefly
No, Amazon hasn't revived Joss Whedon's short-lived sci-fi TV series, it's borrowed the name for the Fire phone's other marquee feature: Firefly. In brief, Firefly lets you use the Fire phone's camera to scan and immediately identify a product, pointing you to where you can buy it online — with the Amazon listing front and center, of course.
Firefly doesn't work with everything, or even close to everything. It works well with most smaller items (think groceries, books and Blu-ray discs) as long as they're still in the packaging. It did a decent job of identifying some of my 4-year-old's toys. Firefly even managed to identify the Fire phone itself when I pointed it at the package ... without getting sucked into some kind of endless vortex.
The UI for Firefly is pretty clever. A bunch of swirling dots fly around the screen, changing size, then coalesce around the object. If it works, an outline of the object appears, and the area outside of it dims. Finally, the object's listing and photo appear at the bottom.
When Firefly works, it's a wonder. None of the technology is particularly new, but the path from object to online has never been shorter. And it works fast — most objects are scanned in a just a second or two. It also work with text: You can scan in business cards, email addresses and even URLs. Like Shazam, Firefly saves everything you scan in a stream, so you can find them long after the scan.
Moreover, Firefly is addictive. The first time you successfully scan something, you'll start hunting for more things to scan. Identifying something actually feels like a reward — you feel good when it works and dismayed when it doesn't. This is digital gratification at its finest.
Camera and more
Amazon's 13-megapixel camera is a notch below most other smartphone cameras today. While photos taken outdoors in bright sunlight were great (they always are), low-light performance was so-so. Pics I took in a poorly lit basement were pretty grainy, although color was still pretty good. White balance in many pics was slightly off, making skin tones appear a bit green.
What the camera lacks in quality it makes up for in convenience. I really liked that it recommends when to use HDR (high dynamic range) mode, which can really improve shots with light and dark areas. I also love that there's a dedicated camera shutter button (which also activates Firefly with a longer press), though I wish it was on the right side of the phone instead of the left. Unfortunately, there's no slow-motion mode.
The best part, however, is the seamless integration with Amazon Cloud. Certainly, there's no shortage of ways to automatically back up your phones to the cloud, but with the Fire phone there are literally zero steps. Even if you've never used Amazon Cloud before, once you start using Fire, you can simply visit your photo cloud in a browser (while signed into Amazon) and all your pics just appear. This level of convenience may be fairly common now, but it was a hard slog to get here. Kudos to Amazon for ensuring this service works as it should.
I also have to give Amazon props for Mayday, the phone's one-button gateway to technical support. One touch, and within seconds (typically) you'll be talking to a customer-service rep in a small picture-in-picture window on the screen.
Mayday reps can see what's on your phone's screen but not you, even though you can see them. They're polite and generally helpful, although I discovered that Dynamic Perspective is disabled for the duration of any Mayday call. That's inconvenient if you're calling aboutDynamic Perspective, which I was when Lastpass was mucking it up, but I managed to figure that one out on my own.
And, oh yeah, this is a phone. Call quality on the Fire was fine — about as good as anything you can get on AT&T's network. The 4G LTE connection was very solid in the NYC area.
Fire starter
When Jeff Bezos unveiled the Fire phone in June, there was a big expectation that Amazon would somehow differentiate on price, since standing out on features would be too difficult in such a crowded space. Instead, the Fire phone ends up being all about a certain special feature.
That feature isn't Firefly, or Dynamic Perspective or any other piece of technological trickery.
The Fire phone's true specialty is making its owner feel like the center of the universe. Whether it's Mayday's instant assistants, Firefly's crowd-pleasing scans, or the UI that responds to a mere glance, Fire is all about you, the customer.
Check that. It's about you, the Amazon customer. Amazon services run deep in the Fire phone, and it hooks new loyalists by including 12 months of Prime membership. You can't fault a company for evangelizing its own products, though, and Amazon's (unlike, say, Samsung's) are often best in class (Prime Video offers a lot that Netflix doesn't).
With that philosophy behind it, the Fire pushes Amazon further on the path of becoming the next Apple. Its hardware strategy was backward (tablets before phones) and its software borrowed, but Amazon has created a real ecosystem that fosters loyalty among its users.
For the Amazon faithful, Fire completes the platform with the most powerful and intimate of devices — the one that's carried at all times. For the uninitiated, it's the most powerful gateway drug the company could have built. Either way, Fire will sear Amazon's mark on you, and you'll probably like it.
