It’s a great question. I wish I would have asked it — and I just might next year! Of all the innovations and introductions of 2014, which was the worst?
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell, simply because we tend to forget the flops. In this case, however, the results are pretty much unanimous — and I have to agree:
The Amazon Fire Phone is 2014’s biggest flop.
I’m disappointed, of course. I wrote Amazon Fire Phone For Dummies. I can share with you that I most likely won’t retire with any income from that title. While I really like the phone and believe Amazon did a great job with the interface and features, the public is seriously disinterested. That’s too bad, too.
Competition is good for any market. Having a viable alternative to the Apple and Google universe would be a solid thing. Look at Microsoft: They keep trying! Amazon is truly an out-of-the-box thinker, so I hope they don’t give up entirely on an alternative phone. For now, the Fire Phone remains 2014 biggest tech flop of the year.
Since you are the only person I know who has used the Fire phone, could you give a one sentence description of what the Fire phone is ~really~ like? The TV commercials pretty much play up to what I would have guessed, that the Fire phone UI is one big single purchasing app for buying Amazon media. Does this phone do anything besides buy/view Amazon media?
Comment by BradC — January 2, 2015 @ 12:41 pm
The primary advantage to a Fire Phone is that you can easily buy stuff from Amazon. It also works well in their ecosystem: Amazon Music, Amazon Apps, Amazon Cloud Storage. It’s a good phone. I liked it. It was reliable and had an excellent camera — probably the best Camera app I’ve used on a phone.
The only major downside I saw was that the Fire Phone is available only on AT&T. Verizon is the big dog. If a manufacturer doesn’t have a phone on the Verizon network, then I don’t take them seriously. Now they do sell loose phones, which is cool.
My guess is that Amazon will reintroduce the Fire Phone in the future. I hope they do. The market needs competition.
Comment by admin — January 2, 2015 @ 3:39 pm