Amazon Fire Phone Reviews Are In: Roundup of Expert Opinions on Specs, Price, and Features as Launch Date Draws Near

Amazon's first entry into the smartphone market, the Fire Phone, launches this week on the 25th and that means the reviews are out!

The world's biggest online marketplace created quite a buzz last month when it announced it would be launching a smartphone; however, many people initially had their doubts about the phone's ability to compete in today's competitive mobile market.

And unfortunately for Amazon, those doubters seem to have been proven right, at least based on the overwhelmingly mixed reviews for the Fire Phone.

From the emphasis on its gimmicky four face-tracking cameras mounted on the front of the phone, to the lack of apps and the premium pricing, whatever Amazon actually did right with their first smartphone seems to have been severely overshadowed by what it did wrong. 

DYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE

The most talked about feature when the phone was first announced was its ability to track a user's face using four front-mounted cameras, with the goal being to provide what would normally be referred to as a "3D" experience.

What Dynamic Perspective does is allows users to tilt the Fire Phone and sort of peek around the corners, if you will, of whatever they're looking at. But it falls flat with reviewers, unfortunately.

"Is Dynamic Perspective a gimmick? A little bit," claims Jessica Dolcourt in her review of the phone for CNET.

This is a sentiment echoed by other reviewers, who conclude that while being able to tilt the phone and have it provide a quasi-3D experience is kind of neat, it really doesn't add to the phone's functionality in any meaningful way -- yet. Though some reviewers said that DP did enhance their gaming experience to some degree. 

FIREFLY

This is supposed to be Amazon's idea of a killer app, and -- in theory -- it's pretty cool. Firefly uses the Fire Phone's camera to analyze whatever you place in front of it -- books, movies, even an audio track -- and then finds it for you in Amazon's online market. It essentially makes buying anything you can think of (from Amazon) easier than ever. 

According to most reviewers, Firefly is pretty cool when it works. Engadget stated:

It scanned music and shows with near-perfect accuracy. It could easily pick up a large number of products within a couple seconds -- even something as basic as an office telephone popped up immediately as I waved the phone in front of it -- but this happened roughly 75 percent of the time. The other 25 percent was an exercise in frustration: Either it'd take too long to find anything, or it wouldn't pick anything up at all.

Firefly is limited to accurately scanning objects within less 10 feet of the phone, and doesn't appear to be able to scan things at an angle. The verdict here seems to be Firefly has a lot of potential, but it simply isn't there yet.

The good news is that it is open to developers who will hopefully take advantage of what appears to be the framework of a pretty awesome tool.

AMAZON APPS

The Fire Phone is based on Android's open software platform, yet it doesn't support Google's app ecosystem. That means no Gmail, Google Maps, or even YouTube. Yikes.

It's understandable that Amazon wants users to use their own equivalent of Google's core apps, but Fire OS also doesn't support the Google Play Store and it's hundreds of thousands of apps.

That means you're limited to only the apps made specifically for Amazon's custom OS, and right now that list simply can't compare with what you'd get on either iOS or Android -- or even Windows Phone. 

FIRE OS

Whatever Fire OS's faults, at least it's original. That said, the "original OS" Amazon created for the Fire Phone appears to be convoluted at best.

And what's worse is that to access information in each app, Amazon want's you to flick or tilt the phone up, down, left and right. Of this sort of "navigation," the Verge described it as "twist[ing] the phone around like a lunatic to find things."

"You can't even see the time without tilting your phone just so. An errant buzz is your only indication that you have a notification, prompting you to cock your wrist or swipe down from the top bezel to open the notification windowshade. None of this is explained, none of it is intuitive. Dynamic Perspective makes everything look cleaner, but makes actually using your phone a lot harder. I don't need my phone to be clever, or spartan. I need it to be obvious. The Fire Phone is anything but." 

That's not good. Ultimately, a lot of the Fire Phone's quirks and flaws can be corrected in the next version, the only question is: does anyone care?

With Apple reportedly poised to release not one, but two versions of the iPhone this year, and four to five "flagship" Android phones being launched each year, it begs the question of how the Fire Phone will manage to find a home in anything more than a small niche market. 

The platform Amazon has created certainly has room to grow, but given that the first Amazon smartphone is only available on one carrier (AT&T) and costs as much as a premium Android or Apple smartphone, and doesn't support even a fraction of the apps people know and expect on a mobile device, it's hard to foresee any significant number of users buying to the Fire Phone as a phone (as opposed to an Amazon buying tool).

Better luck next time?