Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Endorsement of the Fire Phone


"I am not embarrassed to say that it still seems like a good idea to have changed from the elegant iPhone 5s to this scrappy little new device." 

- Len Edgerly of The Kindle Chronicles about his new Amazon Fire Phone


I just thought that was a typically charming, inscrutable, and funny comment from Len.
As to the Fire Phone... it seems to me that Amazon needed a phone, but were out of ideas for a Unique Selling Point. It seems if not a desperate, then at least an oddly lateral business move to have the phone's major feature be an expensively developed technology to let the phone know where your noggin is at. A feature which nobody, not even Amazon, knows what it may be good for some day besides a cool demo to your friends.

I'd hoped Amazon had done more to make the phone a good ereader. Especially a bigger screen is important. I've been riding that hobby horse to death for a long time, but these days I'm not alone anymore. Just today, the MacObserver once more jumps in there.
The idea that we could function these days with a 3.5 inch smartphone display seems entirely ridiculous. It was only relatively recently that Apple, with the iPhone 5, switched to a 4 inch display and stayed there with the iPhone 5c/5s. Many think Apple waited too long, and I agree.
Along the way, we smartphone customers started doing so much more. We navigate with Google maps in a sunlit car going 65 mph. We watch Netflix in the doctor's waiting room — or read a Kindle book. We take fantastic photos and want to appreciate them right away. We monitor the local weather with Doppler radar. We do online shopping and banking. And we can even create modest text documents. All that requires serious screen real estate

1 comment:

CalgaryMark said...

I don't have an iPhone or Kindle or Amazon phone (at first I misread the comment you posted - I missed the 's' from scrappy . . ., and I was on my desktop screen, too!).

Recently I was on the other side of the Great Firewall of China and the only device that (partially) worked was my Samsung Galaxy SIII - I had Gmail and Kobo, to read on the 4.3" screen. That worked OK, read three books; usually I use my Tab2 with a 7" screen, better but heavier. Both of them work better than the Kobo device I originally bought.