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You’re missing my point. 3D animations of the World Trade Center don’t make turn by turn navigation better. If you are using turn by turn navigation and need a 3D image of a building to help you navigate, then you are lost in more ways than one.

No, I'm not missing your point at all. You don't see the need for 3d buildings. Truth is you are not trying understand my point based on your prior flippant response.

My experience with navigation is that

1) Intersections in major cities can be complex. There are 5 and 6 point intersections, traffic circles, rapid succession of streets, and all under the pressure of traffic behind you.

2) Street name signs are not always visible or even exist

3) GPS turn-by-turn is not always 100% accurate when it comes to WHEN to turn; i.e., 25ft, 100ft, etc.

Having a 3D model of where you are allows you to have one more check point to scope out where to turn well before you are suppose to. These eases driver anxiousness and prevents accidents and traffic slowdowns.

Also when walking in a new cities where you are not sure which direction to walk, like when coming out of a subway, its easier to look at a visual of buildings on a map than to walk down the block to check if you are going the right direction.

I understand you are probably smarter than anyone else in the world, but a lot of smart people find it helpful to have additional references other than an arrow that says turn here in 100ft. Men especially are visual animals and historically relied on physical landmarks for navigation on land or in the sky. The entrance of 3D modeling is just the 21st century version.
 
I expect this handset to go the way of the Facebook phone in terms of pricing. By the holidays, it will probably be free (or close to it) on contract and the off contract pricing will probably be closer to $450.00 for the 32 GB model and $550.00 for the 64 GB model.

There's way too much competition in the smartphone market for them to be successful pricing a brand new smartphone platform at those prices and they have to know that. They're just getting the early adopters to pay the premium price.

If the Fire Phone platform takes off within 12 months and is seen as a viable competitor to iOS and full-blown Android, then perhaps they can get away with selling their next-gen phone for the prices they announced yesterday. But that's a big "if".

Sure, people know the Amazon name; but people also know the Facebook name and that didn't make them run out to buy the Facebook phone. I'm perfectly content having an Amazon app on my iPhone to allow me to interact with Amazon. I don't, however, want Amazon to be in charge of my core smartphone experience based on what I saw yesterday. It's not that I don't trust Amazon -- I do. It's just that I rely on my iPhone too much to consider jumping to another company's "1.0" release.
 
Of course here comes the flood of comments saying how this feature is dumb and the phone sucks..... Of course if apple implements some of these features they will be awesome and revolutionary.

Yes, because Apple actually thinks through its features. Others, like Amazon, just throw it out there to be cool but don't really link the functionality very deep into the experience.
 
It doesnt matter what features another phone manufacturer has on their phone (usable or not)... Your still going to buy an iPhone every year! Even if its the same phone - in gold - or plastic.
 
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Nothing in the feature set interests me. The facial tracking seems like a useless gimmick. The tilt navigation has already been done. Firefly seems like the ultimate expression of our consumer/consumption obsessed culture. Do I really need a faster way to buy stuff from Amazon?

All of that, plus the price make this phone DOA.
 
You're completely wrong. Everyone wanted a cheap iPhone last year which was suppose to be the iPhone C. The iPhone C tanked because it was expensive. Apple is just plain greedy. I knew after the price was announced it would suck. Price the iPhone C today for $200 and it would sale like hotcakes even with those fruity colors. The new unlocked Motorola G LTE is only $218 with no contract and is just as powerful with similar build quality.

You keep using that word... I'm not sure it means what you think it means. The iPhone 5C didn't "tank"... not in the least:

http://appleinsider.com/articles/14...indows-phone-and-every-android-flagship-in-q4
 
I have to agree with the comments saying the UI looks to be a mess. But let's go feature by feature here.

Dynamic Perspective

Some compare this to the iOS7 parallax effect. It isn't quite the same; this is much more movement than the parallax effect, and it appears to be more like a rendered scene (ex, surfaces which extend from near to far, not all flat surfaces facing the user). Personally, I like the subtle depth of the parallax effect. Maybe after the gimmick wears off and Amazon brings out their Fire OS 5 or so, their "perspective" effects will also be subtle rather than jarring.

From a tech perspective, this is very different from iOS parallax, in that it is looking at the user's face (not sure what happens in a crowded room) through a combination of four cameras tracking an emitted IR light field (Kinect-like so far as I can tell). It somehow decides who is the "viewer" in the room and if that viewer's head moves up, down, left, or right, adjusts the view accordingly.

For a single viewer, and if the system works perfectly, it will be better than Apple's accelerometer/level-based parallax movement. But I'm not sure it's worth four cameras and four IR-pattern emitters to accomplish.

Firefly Technology

This is a "great" technology for Amazon. So great, I'd be surprised if they keep it exclusive to their own hardware. I expect to see an Amazon app for iOS and even Windows Phone coming out soon.

That said, the basics are already out there. You have several apps to listen to audio and identify the song/movie/ad, and countless barcode-scanner apps. I haven't seen anything recognizing books and magazines from the covers, but that isn't a huge leap from what is out there (needs access to good book-front/magazine-front images ... which we actually know Amazon does not really have given the number of titles with crappy or even nonexistent photos, but if single-sourced they probably have the closest library out there). Pulling email and URL and phone numbers from OCR'd text is not a great leap forward technologically, but surprisingly I haven't seen it around out there before this (I'd be really surprised if there were any kind of patent on this, though, so expect clones to implement this tomorrow).

What is not out there is a single place to go for all that. That's where Amazon could put out an app to drive people to their storefront to buy a million little things each, or they can seek that Amazon ad as a "feature" on their phone and sell a thousand phones. I'm guessing they will quickly transition this from an exclusive feature to a "hardware works best with" feature (although, honestly, I don't see a hardware-software tie-in here beyond the commodity features all smartphones share).

Mayday

Meh. Might be a great feature for some, but I just can't speak to it because I can't see myself ever using it. Now, providing those help tools to someone besides the dolt in Amazon's call center warehouse? That would be useful, and for more than just "I can't figure out how to turn on the camera!" cries for help.

One-handed scrolling

My phone has that. It's called "hold with your hand and flick up with your thumb".

I see auto-scrolling as useful as the old Microsoft IntelliMouse "trick" of clicking the center mouse wheel on an IE window and dragging to auto-scroll. Constantly scrolling text is very hard to read. Text which scrolls based on a reorientation of the device (again, I'm assuming perfect tracking of the user's face here, but if that isn't absolutely perfect this will be even more of a nightmare) is annoying; I don't hold my phone rigidly pointing at my face when I am reading. I often tilt it, especially when I am looking away at something else in the room. If I did that and looked back to see I'd scrolled ten pages on, I think I'd throw the phone out the window.

In short: clearly demo ware, to be the first "feature" disabled on any real non-teenager's phone.

Tilt navigation

Same as above. Why? This is a hidden interaction, which is easily accidentally triggered, which will not have an obvious "how to get back" when it happens nor "why did that happen", so it will tend to happen over and over again. This is an absolute nightmare of a UI.

FWIW, the "shake to undo" feature in iOS apps is similar, but not quite as easy to trigger. I've been handed phones with a plaintive "why does this dialog keep coming up?" from several people. When I explain it, they get it, but not to the point that they would ever actually use is. An "undo" button on the UI is infinitely more usable, less surprising, and makes people less worried about "breaking" their device by shaking it too hard. A tile doesn't have the "am I going to break it" aspect, but is equally unexpected, inexplicable, and better-off-left-to-an-onscreen-gesture.

Advanced Camera

Well, remains to be seen. Just going off their promotional materials, their nighttime comparison of Galaxy S5, Amazon Fire, and iPhone 5S isn't terribly convincing. The Galaxy S5 has more noise, and the noise is "reduced" using blurring; Amazon says this is "blurry", and it is correct. The iPhone has less noise to start with, and doesn't attempt to reduce it significantly, resulting in noticeable noise. Amazon says this is "noisy" and is somewhat correct. The Amazon phone looks to have started with more noise than the iPhone photo (which is alarming considering it says it used OIS to quadruple the exposure time!), then blurred it away, but not as much as the Samsung phone. Amazon apparently thinks this is "just right". Not sure why that particular setting of noise reduction is a banner feature, given you can adjust the noise reduction settings on most phones anyway. The iPhone is known for its stellar low-noise sensor - not anywhere near on par with a Sony APC-sized sensor like what you'd get on Nikon SLRs or full-frame sensors, obviously, but for the size the iPhone is very low-noise natively. Out of the gate, without years of research, we are to believe that Amazon has surpassed the iPhone in image quality? I doubt it.

OIS

Yes, optical image stabilization is great. On a great camera, it is really awesome. Given the one sample image Amazon put out, though, I'm really worried that aside from OIS, this is a bit of a crap camera.

The downside with OIS is that it reduces "noise" by increasing the exposure times, which lets in more light, so the pixels in the sensors aren't stuck detecting a small number of photons. This means that for a completely static shot, OIS is a great thing. But a typical indoors shot OIS will often be useless.

If you have a great low-noise sensor, putting OIS on it is awesome, because I can then choose. If you are giving me a crap sensor and trying to sell it with OIS, though, that's no deal at all.

Lenticular Photos?

Not sure what to make of this. The display is not lenticular, so far as they are saying (it does "3d" by face tracking, not eye-to-eye stereo graphics). Why would you want to take lenticular photos? Is this some underground "thing" I have just completely missed?

Hardware camera button

I like this. Do worry about accidental triggers, but I like not having to interact with the screen to start taking photos.

Burst capture

Okay, but no frames per second? The name "burst capture" has been used for rates from one-frame-per-second (really) to 3fps (low-end consumer SLR, point-and-shoot standard) to 6.5fps (high-end consumer SLR) to 10fps (iPhone 5S). It has also been misused to describe frames from 30fps video (as opposed to full-camera-resolution frames).

Amazon, what do you mean by this? I'm assuming if it was anywhere near the iPhone's burst mode they would have said so either with a spec or a "better than iPhone 5S" note. But, they don't. I'm guessing they mean ~3fps until they prove otherwise.

Cloud Storage

Unlimited photo storage. That is nice. Only 5GB storage for everything else, though. Not very useful. Can it backup and restore locally, or only to the cloud? If cloud backup is the only option, and 5GB is the only storage for free, either most folks will need to pay for extra storage in the cloud, or they will be going without up-to-date backups. Doesn't sound good.

Overall Assessment

I think Amazon has tried to put too many gee-whiz "looks cool the first time" features into this phone, sacrificing long-term usability. That goes for the hardware and the OS. The OS can probably eventually be fixed.
 
I'm a little late to the party here but... hell yeah good competition!!!!! this sounds like a great device, and will push apple to be better.

lots of the gimicks here don't sound like flat out failures judging by the first hands on reviews that have come out.

see guys, this is what happens when a company still has their initial visionary in charge. nicely done, bezos!
 
This is great APPLE news!

I'll be the first to say it: I don't care.

It's interesting to see what the competition is doing. Also gives an idea as to possible new features for future iPhones. The 3D thing looks clever. I'd like to see that on my iPhone.
 
Doubt Apple will be worried by this. Google will though.

dumbest comment ever. First, no one will worry except maybe BB or MS.

Why would Google worry? They have a crap ton more users than anyone. Android as a platform has huge market share... waaaaaaay more than apple. It's different if you compare iphone sales to galaxy sales, but as a platform.... no.

These are the comments that make Android people want to beat iSheep as they call them. Please don't act like one of those people.
 
No personality disorder here

No one cares.

1. Let everyone know that you don't care
2. Pretend to speak for everyone

----------

I have to agree with the comments saying the UI looks to be a mess. But let's go feature by feature here.

Dynamic Perspective

Some compare this to the iOS7 parallax effect. It isn't quite the same; this is much more movement than the parallax effect, and it appears to be more like a rendered scene (ex, surfaces which extend from near to far, not all flat surfaces facing the user). Personally, I like the subtle depth of the parallax effect. Maybe after the gimmick wears off and Amazon brings out their Fire OS 5 or so, their "perspective" effects will also be subtle rather than jarring.

From a tech perspective, this is very different from iOS parallax, in that it is looking at the user's face (not sure what happens in a crowded room) through a combination of four cameras tracking an emitted IR light field (Kinect-like so far as I can tell). It somehow decides who is the "viewer" in the room and if that viewer's head moves up, down, left, or right, adjusts the view accordingly.

For a single viewer, and if the system works perfectly, it will be better than Apple's accelerometer/level-based parallax movement. But I'm not sure it's worth four cameras and four IR-pattern emitters to accomplish.

Firefly Technology

This is a "great" technology for Amazon. So great, I'd be surprised if they keep it exclusive to their own hardware. I expect to see an Amazon app for iOS and even Windows Phone coming out soon.

That said, the basics are already out there. You have several apps to listen to audio and identify the song/movie/ad, and countless barcode-scanner apps. I haven't seen anything recognizing books and magazines from the covers, but that isn't a huge leap from what is out there (needs access to good book-front/magazine-front images ... which we actually know Amazon does not really have given the number of titles with crappy or even nonexistent photos, but if single-sourced they probably have the closest library out there). Pulling email and URL and phone numbers from OCR'd text is not a great leap forward technologically, but surprisingly I haven't seen it around out there before this (I'd be really surprised if there were any kind of patent on this, though, so expect clones to implement this tomorrow).

What is not out there is a single place to go for all that. That's where Amazon could put out an app to drive people to their storefront to buy a million little things each, or they can seek that Amazon ad as a "feature" on their phone and sell a thousand phones. I'm guessing they will quickly transition this from an exclusive feature to a "hardware works best with" feature (although, honestly, I don't see a hardware-software tie-in here beyond the commodity features all smartphones share).

Mayday

Meh. Might be a great feature for some, but I just can't speak to it because I can't see myself ever using it. Now, providing those help tools to someone besides the dolt in Amazon's call center warehouse? That would be useful, and for more than just "I can't figure out how to turn on the camera!" cries for help.

One-handed scrolling

My phone has that. It's called "hold with your hand and flick up with your thumb".

I see auto-scrolling as useful as the old Microsoft IntelliMouse "trick" of clicking the center mouse wheel on an IE window and dragging to auto-scroll. Constantly scrolling text is very hard to read. Text which scrolls based on a reorientation of the device (again, I'm assuming perfect tracking of the user's face here, but if that isn't absolutely perfect this will be even more of a nightmare) is annoying; I don't hold my phone rigidly pointing at my face when I am reading. I often tilt it, especially when I am looking away at something else in the room. If I did that and looked back to see I'd scrolled ten pages on, I think I'd throw the phone out the window.

In short: clearly demo ware, to be the first "feature" disabled on any real non-teenager's phone.

Tilt navigation

Same as above. Why? This is a hidden interaction, which is easily accidentally triggered, which will not have an obvious "how to get back" when it happens nor "why did that happen", so it will tend to happen over and over again. This is an absolute nightmare of a UI.

FWIW, the "shake to undo" feature in iOS apps is similar, but not quite as easy to trigger. I've been handed phones with a plaintive "why does this dialog keep coming up?" from several people. When I explain it, they get it, but not to the point that they would ever actually use is. An "undo" button on the UI is infinitely more usable, less surprising, and makes people less worried about "breaking" their device by shaking it too hard. A tile doesn't have the "am I going to break it" aspect, but is equally unexpected, inexplicable, and better-off-left-to-an-onscreen-gesture.

Advanced Camera

Well, remains to be seen. Just going off their promotional materials, their nighttime comparison of Galaxy S5, Amazon Fire, and iPhone 5S isn't terribly convincing. The Galaxy S5 has more noise, and the noise is "reduced" using blurring; Amazon says this is "blurry", and it is correct. The iPhone has less noise to start with, and doesn't attempt to reduce it significantly, resulting in noticeable noise. Amazon says this is "noisy" and is somewhat correct. The Amazon phone looks to have started with more noise than the iPhone photo (which is alarming considering it says it used OIS to quadruple the exposure time!), then blurred it away, but not as much as the Samsung phone. Amazon apparently thinks this is "just right". Not sure why that particular setting of noise reduction is a banner feature, given you can adjust the noise reduction settings on most phones anyway. The iPhone is known for its stellar low-noise sensor - not anywhere near on par with a Sony APC-sized sensor like what you'd get on Nikon SLRs or full-frame sensors, obviously, but for the size the iPhone is very low-noise natively. Out of the gate, without years of research, we are to believe that Amazon has surpassed the iPhone in image quality? I doubt it.

OIS

Yes, optical image stabilization is great. On a great camera, it is really awesome. Given the one sample image Amazon put out, though, I'm really worried that aside from OIS, this is a bit of a crap camera.

The downside with OIS is that it reduces "noise" by increasing the exposure times, which lets in more light, so the pixels in the sensors aren't stuck detecting a small number of photons. This means that for a completely static shot, OIS is a great thing. But a typical indoors shot OIS will often be useless.

If you have a great low-noise sensor, putting OIS on it is awesome, because I can then choose. If you are giving me a crap sensor and trying to sell it with OIS, though, that's no deal at all.

Lenticular Photos?

Not sure what to make of this. The display is not lenticular, so far as they are saying (it does "3d" by face tracking, not eye-to-eye stereo graphics). Why would you want to take lenticular photos? Is this some underground "thing" I have just completely missed?

Hardware camera button

I like this. Do worry about accidental triggers, but I like not having to interact with the screen to start taking photos.

Burst capture

Okay, but no frames per second? The name "burst capture" has been used for rates from one-frame-per-second (really) to 3fps (low-end consumer SLR, point-and-shoot standard) to 6.5fps (high-end consumer SLR) to 10fps (iPhone 5S). It has also been misused to describe frames from 30fps video (as opposed to full-camera-resolution frames).

Amazon, what do you mean by this? I'm assuming if it was anywhere near the iPhone's burst mode they would have said so either with a spec or a "better than iPhone 5S" note. But, they don't. I'm guessing they mean ~3fps until they prove otherwise.

Cloud Storage

Unlimited photo storage. That is nice. Only 5GB storage for everything else, though. Not very useful. Can it backup and restore locally, or only to the cloud? If cloud backup is the only option, and 5GB is the only storage for free, either most folks will need to pay for extra storage in the cloud, or they will be going without up-to-date backups. Doesn't sound good.

Overall Assessment

I think Amazon has tried to put too many gee-whiz "looks cool the first time" features into this phone, sacrificing long-term usability. That goes for the hardware and the OS. The OS can probably eventually be fixed.


i guess that can be reduced to "phone sucks because it's too super awesome!"
 
WHY?
Have you heard about "cloud" computing???? Why would I need a 64 GB phone when I can have a 100GB cloud service? Every user is different, and I listen to raw audio, so I HAVE to go to the cloud in order to get what I want. If your an MP3 fan, 16 GB's can supply MORE than you can listen to on a commute.

Eh, 1080p video takes up a large amount of space as well. Has Apple started uploading video you take on the iPhone to iCloud Photostream (or the new photo service) yet?
 
Ben Thompson has a great take on Amazon's phone strategy.

http://stratechery.com/2014/amazons-whale-strategy/

The question, though, is if the Fire phone is perfect for Amazon’s customers. Just because someone loves Amazon doesn’t mean their entire life is about buying things. And while it’s true that Amazon has gone to great lengths to make the Fire Phone compelling as a phone, it’s still an inferior offering as compared to a high-end Android phone or especially an iPhone when it comes to things like apps. In this respect it’s fair to compare the Fire Phone to Facebook Home and the HTC First: just because people love Facebook didn’t mean they wanted Facebook to dominate their phone, and by extension, their lives.

Moreover, I was troubled by the faint sense of hubris in yesterday’s presentation; it was 45 minutes too long and included far too much self-congratulation and navel-gazing. We get that the design process for Dynamic Perspective was hard, but that doesn’t mean we care. More broadly, Amazon is a horizontal company: they ought to be serving everyone. Having their own phone introduces the wrong sort of incentives when it comes to Amazon’s efforts on Android and the iPhone; it’s the same danger I see in Microsoft focusing on bothservices and devices.

Ultimately, I think Amazon would have been better off investing the considerable time and effort it took to bring the Fire Phone to market into better marketing Prime, as well into a concerted campaign to get users to add and use an Amazon app – with Firefly functionality – on their smartphones. Those Apple-like phone margins may look attractive in the short term, but hasn’t Amazon always been the king of the long term?4
 
Too late to the party for this to matter but...

I can't believe no one is freaking over the idea of having a seller tracking your eye movements while you watch ads. They have done studies (I imagine at some expense) to do this, in an effort to improve how well advertisements work. They really should be giving this phone away. It has been said a lot and here it is again: You are the product.
 
WHY?
Have you heard about "cloud" computing???? Why would I need a 64 GB phone when I can have a 100GB cloud service? Every user is different, and I listen to raw audio, so I HAVE to go to the cloud in order to get what I want. If your an MP3 fan, 16 GB's can supply MORE than you can listen to on a commute.

Have you ever heard that my area has yet to get 3G and broadband speeds? As with many other areas around the world.

The cloud is not ready for most people yet. And just because YOU can survive on 16GB, doesn't mean the rest of the world can. I HAVE to use an iPod Classic for all of my tunes on the go.
 
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