Amazon Fire Phone Review: Full of Gimmicks, Lacking Basics
Geoffrey A. Fowler
The Wall Street Journal
The big idea in Amazon's first smartphone is that you can control the screen just by moving your head. Amazon's Fire phone promises to draw you into a 3-D world where things happen without a touch.
But in reality, the Fire is the grown-up equivalent of a 9-year-old riding a bike with his hands in the air. "Look, Ma, no hands!" It's a neat gimmick, but it won't get you very far.
The $199 phone is packed with a number of such technological bells and whistles that seem clever, for about a day. Amazon has taken worthwhile steps to simplify using the Android operating system, but on the smartphone fundamentals, the Fire stumbles.
* In the past five days, I couldn't once get the Fire's battery to last to day's end—a telephonic cardinal sin.
* Don't expect to get all the apps you love: Though it runs on a version of Google's Android operating system, Google apps like Maps, Drive and YouTube are locked out. And the Fire can't transfer most app purchases from previous phones.
* The controls that track your head, which Amazon calls "dynamic perspective," never become as natural and predictable as just touching the screen with your fingers.
The root of the problem is Amazon's oversize ambitions for its phone, which begins shipping this week. Entering the smartphone market so late, Amazon might have stuck to its mission of ever cheaper, easier and more efficient—perhaps making an inexpensive handset or an extra long-lasting battery.
Instead, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said he wanted to engineer a better smartphone user experience. He smartly gave this first-generation Fire 32 GB of memory, but larded it up with other features of questionable utility and priced it to compete with mature $200 handsets like the iPhone 5S and Samsung Galaxy S5. (All three require a contract for that $200 price; the iPhone and Galaxy come with half the memory.) The comparison seems almost unfair, but it's the one Amazon wants us to make.
The Fire does some things well. None is a reason most people would switch. The screen holds up adequately in sunlight and measures 4.7-inches, a great size to balance grip and thumb reach. The headphones include flat cable and magnetic buds that help prevent tangles. It also has a user interface that clears away the clutter and confusing layout of most Android phones, including easy-to-read panels that emerge from the sides and a home-screen "carousel" with big icons for your most-used apps. Too often, though, it wastes space under those icons recommending things for you to buy.
All Fire owners get a free year of Amazon's $99 Prime shipping and media-streaming service, which defrays the phone's cost. The most helpful original feature, borrowed from Amazon's tablets, is a service called Mayday that speedily connects you with live tech support.
That's the end of the good news. The Fire's rear camera, which includes a lens that's supposed to stabilize images, is close to, but not better than, the reigning champ iPhone 5S. The Fire takes photos at a higher resolution, but images of night landscapes and dark restaurants lacked the detail and natural color I could pick up with the iPhone. (You can judge the results of my shoot-off yourself.)
The biggest reason I wouldn't switch to a Fire is its battery, which like the iPhone is sealed inside and can't be replaced. The phone usually died after about three-quarters of a day's ordinary use—calling, surfing, emailing, mapping and listening to music—and often got warm to the touch. In my battery torture test, which involves streaming a video over Wi-Fi with the screen at 50%, the Fire lasted just 6 hours and 40 minutes, 16% less than the Galaxy, and 25% less than the iPhone.
Amazon says the Fire's battery was designed to last a full day for the average user. To ensure I didn't have a lemon, I actually swapped out my first test model, whose battery lasted less than four hours in regular use.
Given the competition, Amazon makes it harder than it should to switch to the Fire. First, it's available only on the AT&T network in the U.S. Second, because Amazon made its own version of Android, the Fire doesn't come with Google's Play app store, so you must re-buy all of your apps from Amazon. Amazon added Uber, WhatsApp and Instagram for the Fire's launch, but apps I use regularly that still aren't available include Starbucks, LinkedIn and Snapchat. Amazon says it expects a LinkedIn app soon and is in discussion with these other app makers. In the future, Fire will likely battle with Microsoft and Samsung for app developers who have already prioritized Apple and Google.
The apps I missed most are made by Google. Instead of Google Maps, Amazon made its own maps app. It got the location wrong of the house where I grew up, but it isn't as flawed as Apple's first attempt at maps in 2012.
These deficiencies make it difficult to even have a debate over the new technologies that Amazon created for the Fire. I give Amazon credit for creatively entering the smartphone game with two original ideas. I just don't think you need either.
One idea is that the Fire can make it easier to compare prices and shop—on Amazon, of course. A camera mode called Firefly conducts a visual search on whatever's in front of it, including a product, TV show, a phone number, email or Web address. This works best with products in clearly marked packages and signs with large type. It repeatedly read my business card email as "
[email protected]".
Amazon says Firefly works on more than 100 million items—but even if it were perfect, what problem is it solving, exactly? Firefly doesn't add much to the ability we already have to compare prices using product-ID features in Amazon's existing apps.
I had the most hope for the Fire's 3-D-like "dynamic perspective" technology. Computing changed back in 2007 when Apple introduced multi-touch screens on the iPhone. Yet there's no reason touch has to be the only way we operate a phone; it requires lots of compromises, including poor typing and greasy screens.
Firefly might, in fact, make it too easy: One time I used it to identify a box of Multi-Grain Cheerios, accidentally clicked and bought a pack of four. That was a case of user error, but I didn't realize my mistake until I got an email receipt. (Amazon said it has added steps in the ordering process to prevent such user mistakes.)
So Amazon's big idea is making the Fire phone watch you, tracking your face for cues. To do this, it added four extra cameras to the front of the phone and built software that moves the images on the screen with you.
It makes for some pretty 3-D icons and animated lock-screen images. Inside the maps app, dynamic perspective makes it look like you're one of Amazon's drones hovering above renderings of buildings.
You have to learn how to command the phone with your head or how you hold the phone: Turn just a little bit to peek around buildings on the map, or quickly flick the phone to open a side panel with other options. Tilting the phone back makes websites scroll down, which is handy.
Soon enough, though, it starts to feel like a gimmick. This flicking and nodding only worked for me only about three-quarters of the time—just ineffective enough to be a deal-breaker. The hardest part was getting the battery life at the top of the screen to show up. By default it disappears from view unless you peek in the upper right corner. And trust me, nobody wants to be that person on the train twitching at his phone.
There are similar challenges for televisions, which we've long controlled with clunky remotes. Some TV and game console makers have tried gesture-tracking, but so far they, too, feel awkward and imprecise. With both phones and TVs, I'm most hopeful for voice recognition tech, like the kind Amazon integrated brilliantly into its Fire TV streaming box, but the Fire phone doesn't currently have much of.
The phone handset business is in need of new ideas, so I'm actually rooting for Amazon to make inroads that might disrupt the giants. But Amazon's first Fire isn't going to spark much.
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