Fire Phone - Amazon's Smartphone

Have grown tired of my iPhone but not excited about switching to Android. Wonder if Amazon's built a good alternative.

Main thing I'm wondering is whether such a focus on commerce will be a successful differentiator for smartphone adoption. Seemed like simplicity of use, a very good camera, and easy email differentiated the original iPhone in 2007 although my memory is short.

Amazon needs the ecosystem of devices to succeed and they are building it - they now have Kindle, Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire TV, Fire Phone and to top that they have the commerce to get people going with what they can buy or what they have to buy next - which when executed properly will be a big win for Amazon. But, we have to wait and see how this pans out.

@jasonyogeshshah I believe this is built on top of Android... they've just stripped all the Google-ness out of it. I don't think Amazon has a good map or browser alternative. And how could you beat the gmail mail app? And if this relies on their App store... yuck. I have an Amazon Fire Tablet and hate the damn thing because the app store sucks.

The gestures, especially auto scroll, seem to lend themselves to phablets especially well. I'm a little tired of the tech giants trying to convert every digital thing I do in my life to their platform. I like my iPhone with my Amazon Prime with my Dropbox thank you. I realize they're trying to include more people on the platform and just want another point of entry, but I hope people still stand up for their own choices instead of going all in on one of the big players. Lastly, what does this continued push on custom android oses mean for Android development? You already have a host of operating system versions and screen sizes to deal with when developing for android, now there are more and more custom oses with different features. You'll submit to different stores and have different apps? Blagh..

The tilting is exactly the same as in seene http://seene.co/

While we aren't a major app developer, we do have a number of android apps. We aren't even going to consider seeing what it'll take to move our apps to the amazon version until they have enough of a market share to bother. At least 10% of all android devices probably.