When I attended the launch, they had a hands-on period where I noticed a few of the issues people have pointed out in reviews. But every phone has issues.
More worryingly, I asked about a few things that the unique tech in the Fire Phone could be used for - nothing groundbreaking, just little suggestions: "It'd be great to have the tilt controls do ____ here" or "Do you have plans to allow users to turn this on/off?" Things like that. Almost all were met with a "wow, no, I don't think so, we haven't looked into that at all."
I don't mean to suggest I'm some sort of UX genius or anything, these were just ordinary features one would expect to have been considered (and possibly rejected) based on everything Apple, Google, and Microsoft have done to advance the state of the art. Amazon hadn't given a moment's thought to any of them! Combined with the other stuff they tend to do in their original hardware, it cemented my thoughts that there's some kind of weird naivete pervading their entire hardware process, and no one to even recognize it, much less address it.
I was pretty sure from the second I was given the phone to hold that it would be a dud, but felt it was possible that ingenuity might save the day. Unfortunately not the case, and it's too bad because there's so much cool stuff in there!
It's really weird. The FireTV voice recognition is innovative and in practice works incredibly well. Also the box is delivered already configured to your account. Both those ideas are so good they're retrospectively obvious, and you wonder why Apple and Google never did them. I'd buy it again at twice the price.
But the Fire phone? Ugly, overpriced, and nothing that's new is useful. I wouldn't buy it at half the price.
I've never seems company release two things so dramatically different in approach at around the same time before.
Given that all his attention was riveted to the phone, I wonder how much input he had in the FireTV product? Maybe the hands-off approach just worked better.
FireTV was a much, much easier product to develop. It was pretty clear an Android STB was worth doing. In this case, Amazon wisely took the simplest path to get there: Google TV + better content deals and updated hardware and software.
Apple and Google have had voice recognition for years.
Pre-authentication seems insecure.
The Fire Phone is priced high with the assumption that the price will be lower with carrier contracts, a la iPhone and Galaxy. Although, if they get the price down, it could become the "free" phone like old iPhones are.
Just because it's preconfigured with your account doesn't mean it doesn't need a password. My iPhone has my account on it but I still need to type in a code.
And tokens can be abused or stolen (given they're not stored or paired with other tokens/keys residing inside a TPM), we have seen numerous cases of people hijacking others' AWS accounts and using them for mining bitcoin, of all things.
Very true but what is the cost to Amazon if it's stolen? They regularly refund thousands in EC2 fees when people check their keys into github. I'm sure there's a loophole where they don't have to pay rights-holders for stolen works and the cost to stream movies is pretty low at their scale. My guess is that the hardware would be the biggest loss for Amazon in the stolen TV crime. It's also pretty easy to crack the case unless the thieves are using a stolen wifi signal too.
My guess would be that the person you were talking to didn't know the backstory of a particular issue, or didn't want to bring it up. I have seen people demo products I have worked on field a comment like: "Why didn't you do X?" The person demoing may know why we didn't do that (cost/ time/ tradeoff) or know that it is a 1.1 feature.
I've certainly experienced that too, but I didn't get the impression that was the case this time. They had some devs and leads there IIRC, and were answering questions competently.
One big problem I've seen at Amazon is that their tendency towards independent interacting subsystems carries over onto their culture with regards to their hardware.
One team was probably in charge of the camera/3d bit, and they worked on their own while everybody else made their generic implementations of required smartphone features ABC.
I see this all the time, features are planned and implemented without even communicating the fact to another team, when even the briefest pause would have led to the realization that it had enormous implications for them.
I worked on the camera/3d bit, and I can say with good certainty parts of the UI were stubbed out only for integration purposes. When a feature was good enough to dogfood, it was in the builds all the testers got.
More worryingly, I asked about a few things that the unique tech in the Fire Phone could be used for - nothing groundbreaking, just little suggestions: "It'd be great to have the tilt controls do ____ here" or "Do you have plans to allow users to turn this on/off?" Things like that. Almost all were met with a "wow, no, I don't think so, we haven't looked into that at all."
I don't mean to suggest I'm some sort of UX genius or anything, these were just ordinary features one would expect to have been considered (and possibly rejected) based on everything Apple, Google, and Microsoft have done to advance the state of the art. Amazon hadn't given a moment's thought to any of them! Combined with the other stuff they tend to do in their original hardware, it cemented my thoughts that there's some kind of weird naivete pervading their entire hardware process, and no one to even recognize it, much less address it.
I was pretty sure from the second I was given the phone to hold that it would be a dud, but felt it was possible that ingenuity might save the day. Unfortunately not the case, and it's too bad because there's so much cool stuff in there!