Amazon has a knack for stepping into a market and changing the opinion on what is the best. The original Kindle might not have been great, but it brought Amazon’s huge library of books and was able to give Amazon the lead in the e-books market.
The Kindle Fire was another winner, collecting around 10 percent of the whole tablet market in the first two years. Even the Fire TV, Amazon’s set top box, appears to have got a lot of things right at launch, and sales have been steadily coming through.
In the case of the Fire Phone, we cannot see this being another star for Amazon. Several features do not appeal to the mass audience and it feels like Amazon has been working on this for so long, they forgot to update some of the specs.
Fire Phone Issues
There are several issues Amazon cannot fix in the first iteration of the Fire Phone, since it has been officially released in the United States, some European countries and some other countries familiar to Amazon.
Amazon is currently marketing this as a premium quality device, the same price as the Samsung Galaxy S5, HTC One M8 or iPhone 5S on contract. This means we need to look at it as the same quality and dissect the problems.
The first is the display, Amazon decided instead of a 2K or even a 1080p display, they would stick with the 1280 x 720 resolution panel. This is extremely behind the times, when the LG G3 already runs a 2560 x 1440 resolution panel.
The screen is not poor or pixelated, but Amazon is simply offering a worse option, while others like HTC and Samsung at least push it to 1080p, the standard most OEM operate under in 2014.
Problematic UI
A more major issue is the user interface Amazon has designed for the Fire Phone. Not only does Amazon offer too much, they offer the experience in a way that is unintuitive and weird.
In some apps, menus and navigation will work in different ways and it feels like Amazon has not put much thought into clarity. The 3D effect is another feature we are not certain on, while it offers a few unique features, it feels like more of a battery burden than anything else.
Price
And now we hit the main issue with the Fire Phone, the fact Amazon thought it could live up to the HTC One M8 and iPhone 5S. Starting at $199 on contract at AT&T, this phone shouldn’t appeal to anyone, unless 3D is a mind-blowing technology.
If Amazon had offered the Fire Phone for $100 or $0 on contract and perhaps $399 off contract, it might be worth a look, but then we still have the OnePlus One and Nexus 5 as better options.
Next year, we might see Amazon thin out some of the errors on the UI and pack the Fire Phone with decent specs or they might drop the idea of a smartphone, similar to HTC with the Facebook phone.
