What's Wrong With the Amazon Fire Phone?

A friend recently asked me why the Amazon Fire Phone wasn't selling better.

After all, Amazon usually knows what it is doing. The phone has all sorts of cool features such as gesture control and 3D. Most of all, it has the marketing muscle of Amazon. For example, if anyone has received an Amazon package lately, it was sealed using tape promoting the phone.

Yet the retailer is practically giving the phone away—the price just dropped to 99 cents. Obviously, something is wrong with the Fire Phone. So I decided to get one to find out.

(When first confronted with the question I immediately responded in a knee-jerk style saying, "because it is exclusive to AT&T and people hate AT&T." While this may be true, it would not stop a great product since people also hate Verizon and Sprint. As far as I can tell only T-Mobile has any real fans.)

So let's look at the Fire Phone, which feels terribly flawed before you even boot the damn thing.

First of all, the fit and finish is terrible. It's similar to an iPhone 4 with the back and front outfitted with Gorilla Glass. But this now "old-fashioned" look is not the problem; the phone feels cheesy.

There is a hard rubbery bumper around the phone that needs de-burring. If you run the back of your fingers across the edge where the screen touches the bumper, it feels like a scraper. It's suitable to remove burnt meat from a pan. Take any phone and run the back of your finger over the edge; it's smooth and slick. Not with this thing. As you hold it, you are constantly aware of this sharp edge all around.

Fire Phone Is Cheesy and Feels Cheap
The entire operation of the Fire Phone is the same way. Most reviews panned it, but not enough said to avoid it at all costs.

No access to Google Play, a sealed battery, have been cited as Fire Phone drawbacks, but these pale in comparison with having to deal with the tilt, twist, shake, and gesture user interface called "dynamic perspective." You have to congratulate Amazon for actually making a device that is less friendly and more undesirable than a Windows Phone. Good work.

It was good to experiment, I suppose, to make any attempt to completely re-invent the smartphone. All these crazy gestures and tilt and shake mechanisms had to be fun to develop. But are they necessary or better? No and no.

Take the back gesture. You swipe from below the screen in a sweeping motion to the left to go back a page. Just like the simple push of the back arrow key on most Android devices. The problem is if you miss the bottom or do not swipe correctly or you are on a screen that does not allow going back this way...nothing happens.

All these different-for-difference-sake mechanisms are flawed. To flip open the right tab with a wrist flick works so poorly that you look like you are having spasms trying to get it to work. There is a screwy tilt feature that allows you to slightly tilt the phone to the left or right and new data is revealed on, say, a map. Okay, so what? Now I have this data which is invariably too small to read and the screen is now tilted making it harder to read.

And what is the point of the 3D screen? It's kind of interesting and has elements of the smaller no-glasses-required 3D displays such as the back of a Fuji 3D camera or a Nintendo 3DS, but it's often herky-jerk and unimpressive. It's as if the mechanism to make it work in the first place is so underpowered that it sometimes hardly works at all. More importantly, what's it for? If you are going to have 3D capability, why not incorporate a way to make some compelling 3D images with the phone? But no. The camera is 2D only. It makes 3D a pointless gimmick with no benefits.

After giving this device a good look, the question, to me, is not why isn't the Amazon Fire phone selling more? It's now, "Why would anyone buy one?"