 Of course Amazon was making a smartphone. Our smartphones are our most personal devices, our most used devices, and Amazon wins when it's right there in front of you. So of course Amazon was making a smartphone. And this is it, the Fire Phone. The first time you look at it or touch it, there's really nothing remarkable about the Fire Phone. It's a black rectangle, a slab of glass, and beveled plastic. It's heavy, but not really. Big, but not really. It's just a phone. It has a 4.7 inch 720p display that's not anything special, but certainly gets the job done. It has three speakers so you'll always get stereo sound. It has a raised home button, which I weirdly like a lot, and an etched Amazon logo on the back. It has excellent performance thanks to a Snapdragon 800 processor and about a day and a half of battery life. It's all good enough without ever standing out. It's just fine. The camera, at least, is fairly straightforward and pretty good. It's 13 megapixels and takes solid sharp images in just about any situation. It's better in low light than almost any Android camera I've tested, actually. There's a nice panorama mode, plus one for taking photos you can look at, with the dynamic perspective features turned on. The only problem is the camera's slow. Slow to focus, slow to shoot, just slow. The only hint you get from looking at the Fire Phone that it might be something a little bit different is the five, count them, five camera lenses pointing out of the front bezel. They make for an ugly front of a smartphone, like exposed screws or visible seams, but they enable one of the most important features of the Fire Phone. That feature is called dynamic perspective. It uses four cameras in the four corners of the Fire Phone's face to recognize your head, its position, and its motion. And then it lets you see lots of different parts of the phone's OS in 3D. Sort of. When you look at the home screen and move your head around, you'll be looking around the icons. You can also move the phone, which responds to tilts and gestures to always be showing you more information. To open the quick settings menu and the notification window, you flick your wrist back and forth with the phone in it. You tilt it to show hidden menus or pop up more information in a map. Amazon's whole idea is to take away most of the information on any given screen and only show you what you want to see at that moment. Games are awesome with dynamic perspective, more immersive than just flat-out more fun. But with everything else, it's just a gimmick, and sometimes it's actually unhelpful. It means that the Fire Phone doesn't always show the time or battery levels. You have to tilt the phone slightly to make them appear. I don't want to do that. I want all of that as accessible as possible. All this tech is open to developers, and they may well find cool ways to use it, but really all I wanted to do was turn it off and just use the phone. The other big new feature of the Fire Phone is Firefly. It's basically an ultra powerful object recognition tool, able to scan email addresses and phone numbers and websites and deodorants and tea bags and books and movies and songs and speakers and almost anything else you put in front of the Fire Phone's camera. At a very basic level, Firefly is a shopping tool, like the ones available for lots of other devices. You're running out of soap, so you scan the bottle and four seconds later you've bought more soap. From Amazon. But you can also listen for a song and in one tap start an iHeart radio station with whatever you were hearing. It's up to developers to make this interesting, because all Firefly does is figure out what's being shown. Eventually it'll do more than just add soap to my Amazon cart. The problem is it doesn't work all that well. It got books right most of the time, always figured out what song I was listening to, but it often couldn't figure out the object at all, or got kind of close but not really. Firefly is kind of its own thing, a single app with a single purpose, but dynamic perspective invades everything about how the Fire Phone works. Its software, Fire OS, is all about three panel interfaces. In the middle, your content. On the left, menus. On the right is what Amazon calls delighters, little additive tricks that add something fun or useful to the app you're in. That concept is fine, even though it's frustrating how few third-party apps currently play along. It's the navigation that's the problem. There's no indication that those menus exist off to the sides, or when they exist, or what's in them. You just have to open an app, flick the phone back and forth a million times, and see where everything is. The Fire Phone's multitasking isn't exactly obvious either. I spent a lot of time just hitting the home button, going back and starting everything over. But even the home screen is confusing. It shows every app, book, or item you've opened in reverse chronological order. As you scroll through them, below each one is related information. Your agenda underneath calendar, recent texts underneath messages. Underneath most of them though is just more stuff to buy. You have a to-do list app? Here are five more! Some things scroll left to right, some up and down, and there's an app drawer hidden underneath the row of icons at the bottom. There's a lot going on here, and once you understand the paradigm, it's even sort of clever. But it's a million miles from obvious or intuitive. The only thing consistently straightforward about the Fire Phone is how easy it is to get things from Amazon. Buying, renting, streaming, anything from Amazon is easy. But that's not what a smartphone is for. A smartphone is for a lot of things. Shopping, definitely among them. But it's also for getting work done, for relaxing, for communicating. And since Amazon doesn't have the Play Store, it's missing a huge number of Android apps, including all of Google's. And everything from the email client, to the calendar app, to maps suffers as a result. Amazon's only going to win if it gets developers on board with its most unique features. And when it can't even compete on number of apps, it's hard to see them really working to develop for one phone on one carrier from Amazon. So the Fire Phone costs $199 with a two-year contract, and it's available from AT&T. It's full of big ideas, a couple of them huge and full of potential that will probably never be realized. In a few months or years, things like Dynamic Perspective and Firefly could go from cool gimmicks to actually important features. Mayday, the super simple one-touch support system, is really awesome as well, and you'll need it in order to figure out how to use the Fire Phone. But in an effort to make something different and new and innovative, Amazon kind of forgot to make a good smartphone. A good smartphone should be fast and efficient, entirely without complications. The Fire Phone tries to be fun and delightful, but too often it's just complicated.
 Of course Amazon was making a smartphone. Our smartphones are our most personal
 devices, our most used devices, and Amazon wins when it's right there in front of
 you. So of course Amazon was making a smartphone. And this is it, the Fire Phone.
 The first time you look at it or touch it, there's really nothing remarkable
 about the Fire Phone. It's a black rectangle, a slab of glass, and beveled
 plastic. It's heavy, but not really. Big, but not really. It's just a phone. It has a
 4.7 inch 720p display that's not anything special, but certainly gets the
 job done. It has three speakers so you'll always get stereo sound. It has a raised
 home button, which I weirdly like a lot, and an etched Amazon logo on the back. It
 has excellent performance thanks to a Snapdragon 800 processor and about a day
 and a half of battery life. It's all good enough without ever standing out. It's
 just fine. The camera, at least, is fairly straightforward and pretty good. It's 13
 megapixels and takes solid sharp images in just about any situation. It's better
 in low light than almost any Android camera I've tested, actually. There's a
 nice panorama mode, plus one for taking photos you can look at, with the dynamic
 perspective features turned on. The only problem is the camera's slow. Slow to
 focus, slow to shoot, just slow. The only hint you get from looking at the Fire
 Phone that it might be something a little bit different is the five, count
 them, five camera lenses pointing out of the front bezel. They make for an ugly
 front of a smartphone, like exposed screws or visible seams, but they enable
 one of the most important features of the Fire Phone. That feature is called
 dynamic perspective. It uses four cameras in the four corners of the Fire Phone's
 face to recognize your head, its position, and its motion. And then it lets you see
 lots of different parts of the phone's OS in 3D. Sort of. When you look at the
 home screen and move your head around, you'll be looking around the icons. You
 can also move the phone, which responds to tilts and gestures to always be
 showing you more information. To open the quick settings menu and the
 notification window, you flick your wrist back and forth with the phone in it. You
 tilt it to show hidden menus or pop up more information in a map. Amazon's whole
 idea is to take away most of the information on any given screen and only
 show you what you want to see at that moment. Games are awesome with dynamic
 perspective, more immersive than just flat-out more fun. But with everything
 else, it's just a gimmick, and sometimes it's actually unhelpful. It means that
 the Fire Phone doesn't always show the time or battery levels. You have to tilt
 the phone slightly to make them appear. I don't want to do that. I want all of
 that as accessible as possible. All this tech is open to developers, and they may
 well find cool ways to use it, but really all I wanted to do was turn it off and
 just use the phone. The other big new feature of the Fire Phone is Firefly.
 It's basically an ultra powerful object recognition tool, able to scan email
 addresses and phone numbers and websites and deodorants and tea bags and books
 and movies and songs and speakers and almost anything else you put in front of
 the Fire Phone's camera. At a very basic level, Firefly is a shopping tool, like
 the ones available for lots of other devices. You're running out of soap, so you
 scan the bottle and four seconds later you've bought more soap. From Amazon. But
 you can also listen for a song and in one tap start an iHeart radio station
 with whatever you were hearing. It's up to developers to make this interesting,
 because all Firefly does is figure out what's being shown. Eventually it'll do
 more than just add soap to my Amazon cart. The problem is it doesn't work all
 that well. It got books right most of the time, always figured out what song I was
 listening to, but it often couldn't figure out the object at all, or got
 kind of close but not really. Firefly is kind of its own thing, a single app with
 a single purpose, but dynamic perspective invades everything about how the Fire
 Phone works. Its software, Fire OS, is all about three panel interfaces. In the
 middle, your content. On the left, menus. On the right is what Amazon calls
 delighters, little additive tricks that add something fun or useful to the app
 you're in. That concept is fine, even though it's frustrating how few third-party
 apps currently play along. It's the navigation that's the problem. There's no
 indication that those menus exist off to the sides, or when they exist, or what's
 in them. You just have to open an app, flick the phone back and forth a million
 times, and see where everything is. The Fire Phone's multitasking isn't exactly
 obvious either. I spent a lot of time just hitting the home button, going back
 and starting everything over. But even the home screen is confusing. It shows
 every app, book, or item you've opened in reverse chronological order. As you scroll
 through them, below each one is related information. Your agenda underneath
 calendar, recent texts underneath messages. Underneath most of them though
 is just more stuff to buy. You have a to-do list app? Here are five more!
 Some things scroll left to right, some up and down, and there's an app drawer
 hidden underneath the row of icons at the bottom. There's a lot going on here,
 and once you understand the paradigm, it's even sort of clever. But it's a
 million miles from obvious or intuitive. The only thing consistently
 straightforward about the Fire Phone is how easy it is to get things from Amazon.
 Buying, renting, streaming, anything from Amazon is easy. But that's not what a
 smartphone is for. A smartphone is for a lot of things. Shopping, definitely among
 them. But it's also for getting work done, for relaxing, for communicating. And since
 Amazon doesn't have the Play Store, it's missing a huge number of Android apps,
 including all of Google's. And everything from the email client, to the calendar
 app, to maps suffers as a result. Amazon's only going to win if it gets developers
 on board with its most unique features. And when it can't even compete on number
 of apps, it's hard to see them really working to develop for one phone on one
 carrier from Amazon. So the Fire Phone costs $199 with a two-year contract, and
 it's available from AT&T. It's full of big ideas, a couple of them huge and full
 of potential that will probably never be realized. In a few months or years, things
 like Dynamic Perspective and Firefly could go from cool gimmicks to actually
 important features. Mayday, the super simple one-touch support system, is
 really awesome as well, and you'll need it in order to figure out how to use the
 Fire Phone. But in an effort to make something different and new and
 innovative, Amazon kind of forgot to make a good smartphone. A good smartphone
 should be fast and efficient, entirely without complications. The Fire Phone
 tries to be fun and delightful, but too often it's just complicated.