8 years ago
11
The Fire Phone started its spectacular flameout one year ago today
It's hard to really feel genuinely surprised about hardware announcements. As fans of technology, we often know about the thing being announced before a company does the actual announcing. This was mostly the case with Amazon's announcement of the Fire Phone, which happened one year ago today. What we didn't know back then was that, 365 days later, the phone would practically have vanished from our minds.
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Ouch. That's gotta hurt. Did anyone every buy one of those things?
I bought a Kindle Fire Stick when they first came out, and it was pretty terrible. The hardware was okay, the experience was fine, but it was pretty much useless without a Prime account. No Plex or any way to stream local media, it was bad. Put it back in the box and haven't touched it since.
The biggest problem with Amazon's Fire-anything is that they want you to use their platform and don't give you a lot of options. The great part about the Android OS is that it is open, but Amazon uses that same OS as their base but then takes away a lot of that. They strip out all of the google play services in exchange for their own app store. Sure, there are ways around it, but why bother if you can just get a different tablet/phone elsewhere?
It essentially locked you down into amazons ecosystem...
Exactly. The closed system works for Apple but anyone else trying to emulate that doesn't have a lot of luck. People looking into other options are going to want an open system. The only person I know who owns a fire tablet is my nephew, and it was a gift from his grandma. I very rarely see them.
Remember the HP tablet fire sale back in 2010 or 2011? HP was sitting on so much stock that they figured to just try and make back as much as they could and move the fuck on. A few of my friends bought a couple of the 99 dollar tablets and as expected no apps ever showed up. It was essentially just a web browser.
Yes! I remember that one. I really wanted one of those tablets, too- just to experience that WebOS was like after they picked it up from Palm.
I wouldn't have thought that anyone without a prime account would buy the Fire Stick. I thought that it, like the Fire Phone and whatever those voice activated things are called were pretty clearly designed for Prime Users.
Honestly, I just never liked any of Amazon's outings, they're clearly designed to learn about and sell things to you. If there were free, I'd consider it, but to pay to be vetted? I'm ok.
Free was the only good option they had and they passed on it. Take a hit at the start but then recoup the losses with the online store.
Yeah everything about amazon products are usually a bit pushy , its a shame because they could have had something great considering their product access.
So very true. If I had their reader,I'd never let it connect to the Internet.