Amazon Fire Phone Faces Poor Reception and Customer Dissatisfaction

In mid-June, the Amazon Fire Phone was unveiled. The retail giant finally entered the smartphone market. It was a move long anticipated by industry observers. From the very start, I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the device in my initial commentary. It didn’t come with particularly useful innovations, was inferior to the competition in many respects, and furthermore, only offered the usual limited selection of apps and customization options. These issues have remained largely unchanged and seem to genuinely hinder the success of the Fire Phone.

On Amazon’s US website, the in-house mobile phone holds the number 1 spot in the sales charts for smartphones with contracts. What initially seems impressive, loses its charm when you glance at the customer reviews. The Fire Phone currently holds only 3.2 stars, which is a disastrous rating for the device. Ouch.

Missing Apps and Other Issues Cause Frustration

The biggest issues appear to be the short battery life and lack of app availability. Due to the heavily customized Android interface, regular Google applications (like YouTube) are missing and cannot be installed later. Additionally, the number of apps in the Amazon App Store is smaller than on Google Play. This has been a problem already noted with the tablets, which well-informed buyers should not find surprising.

The unique feature, “dynamic perspective,” doesn’t appeal to everyone and according to reviews, even gives some users headaches. Apple experienced a similar issue when the parallax effect was introduced with iOS 7. However, the Apple system wasn’t solely reliant on this effect, so turning it off had little impact. It’s a different story for the Fire Phone, which is specifically designed around the dynamic perspective, with four cameras on the front just for this purpose. Despite considerable (though massive) development efforts, the function seems prone to errors in darkness.

Besides the device’s problems and shortcomings, many users are also dissatisfied with the exclusive contract with AT&T. Especially since even the unsubsidized version, costing $649, seems to only work with AT&T and cannot be unlocked for other carriers.

Fire Phone a Flop?

These issues seem to ultimately result in many purchased devices being returned to Amazon. According to estimates by The Guardian based on various figures, it appears that no more than 35,000 Fire Phones are currently in circulation. As usual, Amazon hasn’t disclosed any sales figures.

For comparison: Apple sold 270,000 devices in the first quarter with the first iPhone (also an AT&T exclusive). In the subsequent quarter, Apple sold 1.12 million iPhones to customers. The rest of the story is well-known.

For Amazon, the launch of the Fire Phone hasn’t been a success story. Even with tablets, Amazon faced acceptance challenges outside the USA and the UK. As a popular electronics retailer, Amazon has the advantage of being in a prominent position selling various tablets. But when it comes to contract-bound smartphones, the situation looks quite different—especially when the device is technically inferior to similarly priced competitors.

Now it will be interesting to see whether Amazon is working towards an international launch of the Fire Phone or will continue to offer it exclusively with AT&T in the USA. In any case, the current development is not particularly pleasing for Amazon. Nonetheless, at the launch of its first smartphone, the retail giant kept the door open to bringing more phones to the market. A budget entry-level model, not competing with the Samsung Galaxy S series or the iPhone but instead positioned alongside the Motorola G and priced accordingly, might be more appealing.