- I'm Andru Edwards and you're watching "Gear Live."
(mellow music)
When getting the news
that the most trusted e-commerce brand in the world
was coming up with its own smartphone,
there was a lot of excitement.
However, when it released,
this phone was nowhere close to its expectation
for both users and the company.
Today, we are going through everything you need to know
about the Amazon Fire Phone.
What's going on tech squad, Andru Edwards here.
And as I mentioned, today let's talk
about the Amazon Fire Phone.
Amazon is a colossal online store,
and you most likely even depend on them
for most of your purchases.
But Amazon is a lot larger than just a store.
They also offer Amazon Web Services to clients like Netflix,
NASA, Twitter, Apple, et cetera.
They've also added media streaming to their portfolio
with Amazon Prime Video.
And in addition to that,
they also acquired one of the largest game streaming
platforms in the world, Twitch.
All this is just to show you how much Amazon
wants to acquire market share in any and every sector.
And the Fire Phone was the company's attempt
to break into the smartphone market.
Now to fully understand why Amazon created the Fire Phone,
you gotta go back to the beginning.
Amazon started out selling books, CDs, and DVDs.
As they were entering the digital age,
Jeff Bezos was quick to adapt.
And so Amazon created the Kindle.
The Amazon Kindle was the first piece of hardware
that came out directly from Amazon.
It was also the first e-reader in the world
to gain any sort of significant traction.
Since then, several modifications have been made
to the design and performance of the Kindle
to satisfy customers even better.
Now although being such a big hit,
Bezos was looking to go further
than just the simple e-reader Kindle device.
When the Amazon ecosystem consisted of just books,
the Kindle was good enough.
However, now that they branched out
into other forms of media that the Kindle didn't support,
Amazon needed to make another device
to tie the new broader ecosystem together,
and, hence, the Fire Phone.
So that's why the Fire Phone came into existence.
But before we talk about why it became a relic of the past,
I wanna give a big thank you to this video's sponsor, HP.
Another piece of tech that many think of as old fashioned
is the printer.
However, HP thought long and hard
about how to modernize its line of printers
in a meaningful and useful way with a service called HP+.
HP+ makes your printer smart.
HP+ printers allow you to print from any device,
at any time, no matter where you are.
They actively work to detect any issues
and fix them on their own,
even taking care of software
and security updates for you automatically.
HP+ printers even keep an eye on your ink and toner levels
and can automatically ship you new cartridges
before you run out with HP's smart ink service, Instant Ink.
With Instant Ink, cartridges can be as low
as about half the price that you'd pay
buying cartridges yourself,
without the inconvenience of running to the store
when you're out of ink.
Inside the HP Smart app,
you get several extra features,
like mobile faxing, multi-item scanning, book scanning,
and other advanced features free for two years with HP+.
If you're ready to upgrade
to a more modern printing experience,
get all the smart benefits of HP+ for free
when you purchase a compatible HP printer.
And, once again, big thank you to HP
for sponsoring this video.
Now that we know the history behind the Fire Phone,
let's take a closer look at what this phone
really was and why it failed so miserably.
The Amazon Fire Phone
ran on a Qualcomm 2.2 gigahertz processor,
with Adreno 330 graphics, and two gigabytes of RAM.
The connectivity features included LTE,
HSDPA, Wi-Fi, NFC, and Bluetooth.
In a time when phones were looking at 2K resolutions,
or at least 1080P,
the display resolution of the Amazon Fire Phone
was just 720P.
The Fire Phone had five cameras
on the front panel of the phone and one on the rear,
giving you six cameras altogether.
However, you were only allowed to use
two of the six cameras to take pictures,
more on that later.
But for a phone released in 2014,
the cameras were okay.
Not excellent, but okay.
Hardware wise, there was nothing spectacular
about the build of the phone,
especially when compared to other phones
that were on the market at the time.
Now let's talk about the software.
The Fire Phone was built on Fire OS,
which is a forked version of Google's Android.
Now this isn't anything new.
We've seen Samsung's One UI,
OnePlus's OxygenOS, and Xiaomi's MIUI.
However, the difference is that
while these other companies add something to Android,
Fire OS actually stripped it down
even more bare-bones than it already was.
Also, instead of spending time
to create unique apps with added features,
Fire OS simply gave users a knockoff version
of Google's stock apps.
But the Amazon Fire Phone wasn't built to be the best phone,
it was simply built to be the gatekeeper
of the Amazon ecosystem.
And it did that job well with two main functions.
One, users of the Fire Phone
got unlimited storage for photos,
which got automatically synced to the Amazon Cloud.
And this is before Google did something similar
with Google Photos and the Pixel.
And two, there was the Firefly feature.
This feature let you take pictures of items
in your local market, or anything around you,
and find that product on Amazon immediately.
Unfortunately, this feature was reported
not to be as useful and accurate as advertised,
but you get the idea.
Amazon wanted you to be able
to just simply take a picture of something
and instantly find it and buy it on Amazon,
instead of the store that you were currently standing in.
Now the other features that Amazon put into this phone
were useless at worst and gimmicky at best.
The most prime example, pun intended,
is Dynamic Perspective.
So remember when I mentioned earlier
that you could only use two of the six available cameras
to actually take photos or videos?
Well, the remaining four cameras on the front of the phone
were used to power Dynamic Perspective.
Dynamic Perspective tracked the movement of the head
using four or five of the cameras in front of the phone.
This allowed you to move icons, scroll pages,
and even see parts of images that weren't visible
just by moving your head or tilting the phone.
Now Jeff Bezos poured a lot of time and resources
into the making of this phone.
Now why exactly did this phone fail?
Especially, seeing as the Fire Tablet and Amazon Kindle
have done pretty well.
Now there are five main reasons
why the Amazon Fire Phone failed.
Let's start with the first one, Fire OS.
Fire OS offered users unlimited access
to all the items in the Amazon ecosystem,
purchasing items from the store,
renting and streaming, all approved media,
and maximizing Amazon's Cloud Storage
became exceedingly easier on a Fire Phone.
But take the ease of access to Amazon's ecosystem out,
and there wasn't much to the Fire OS and what it offered.
Okay, second reason the Amazon Fire Phone failed,
it was used as a tool for aggressive marketing.
Under each of the apps,
the system would display related items
to get from the Amazon Store or, in some cases,
other apps you might like.
It was like having the Appstore
plus the Amazon Store as your home screen.
Even though you paid for the phone,
you were getting advertised to right from the home screen,
which really rubbed customers the wrong way.
Third, there were not a lot of apps developed for the OS.
Building a new OS is really difficult,
because it requires developers to put in the extra work
to optimize their apps for the new OS.
However, developers will only do this if they know
your OS is gonna be popular
and a lot of users will be using that OS with their apps.
And, unfortunately, even at launch,
the Fire Phone just wasn't very popular.
Furthermore, this phone didn't have any Google apps,
like Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps,
and a lot of the other Android apps that people depend on.
So converting an Android app to be compatible with Fire OS,
was gonna require a lot of third-party integration,
something that many developers simply didn't wanna do.
Even with all that set aside,
Amazon just didn't offer the variety and quality
of applications you got from the Android store.
If you've ever used the Amazon Appstore,
you'll see just how many apps are lacking.
And sure you can download an APK and run it directly,
but that kills the seamlessness
of the whole phone experience.
Next up, the price.
The price point of the Fire Phone is the next reason
I think the idea failed severely.
The starting price was so high
that potential customers just couldn't wrap their heads
around paying so much
for what was essentially an Amazon billboard
or, in this case, a phone board.
Everybody knows that the primary reason Amazon
is so loved is this tradition
of providing excellent products at great prices.
So most of the consumers and analysts
expected them to tow the same line with the Fire Phone.
This strategy had already worked
with the Kindle and the Fire Tablet,
so I'm not sure why they didn't just go down
that same route.
With the Fire Phone,
Amazon got too ambitious with the price,
trying to sell it as a major flagship smartphone
with a price tag of $650.
Now to put that in perspective,
the Apple iPhone 6 and 6 Plus,
which were Apple's best selling smartphones,
were released in the same year at about the same price.
Pre-orders for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus
hit over 4 million units within 24 hours of release,
which was a record setting figure at the time.
Fast forward three days later,
and over 10 million devices were sold.
The Fire Phone,
despite being released months before the iPhone,
could barely hit 35,000 devices sold,
and you can clearly see why.
It's been six years since the release of the iPhone 6,
and if you look around,
you'll still see people using that same phone
comfortably because it was so good.
Now this isn't just because Apple
has managed to develop,
what some people will call a cult,
with a devout customer base.
If you actually compared
the price to value ratio of both phones,
the Apple iPhone completely throws the Fire Phone
right off the ledge.
Next, let's talk about the gimmicky features.
The next big reason I think the Amazon Fire Phone
was such a big failure is the primary focus of the phone.
The objective of the phone was all wrong.
It seemed like Jeff Bezos wanted more distinctive features
than features that the consumers
were actually interested in or would use.
Based on the highly advertised features,
it was evident that the concern
was more about making a unique product
than something alluring enough
for consumers to hold onto as their main device.
For example, the Dynamic Perspective feature
I talked about earlier in the video.
Now onstage during the announcement,
they made so much fuss about this.
But when people got their hands on the device,
the users just didn't care much about it
because it was virtually useless.
Apart from these main five issues,
there were a few other problems that further contributed
to the burning down of the Fire Phone.
Things like the bland design of the phone,
the restricted ecosystem
that made iOS even seem like heaven at the time,
and just the very mediocre specs.
Now I'm sure you're wondering,
"Just how big was the Fire Phone disaster?"
Well, in October, 2014,
the company reported that it had
a $170 million write down
that was primarily related to the expenditures
on the Fire Phone.
They also had over $83 million
worth of phones sitting in their inventory
that were never sold.
Surprisingly though, this failure did not affect
other aspects of the Amazon business.
They remain one of the most popular brands in the world,
thriving in their online store sales
and sales of their web services.
What I might call a silver lining in this experience
is that the company knows what not to do
the next time they come out with a device.
Knowing Amazon, they probably already have something
in the works, up their sleeve,
and it may not be a phone.
But I think Amazon has learned from the Fire Phone fiasco,
and instead has decided to go all in
on the next operating system
that everyone will be using in the future,
which is voice.
As we've seen,
Amazon's Alexa was the first digital assistant
to be released ahead of Apple's Siri,
and Google's Assistant,
and Microsoft's Cortana,
which has since been deprecated
to almost non-existence at this point.
Almost every smart home device that you see
is compatible with Amazon Alexa.
And five to 10 years from now,
I'm betting that a lot more people
are gonna have a lot more Alexa integrations in their homes,
in their cars, and in their offices.
So there you have it, guys,
that was the first episode of tech fails,
taking a look at the Amazon Fire Phone
and why it didn't catch on.
If you enjoyed this one,
please do leave a comment down below
letting me know what other devices
you want me to take a look at when discussing
the biggest tech fails
in the history of consumer electronics.
Thank you so much for watching as always, guys.
And big shout out to all the channel members
who keep the lights on and keep things running.
I appreciate you guys.
Until next time, I'm Andru Edwards,
and I'll catch you in the next video.
(mellow music ending)