Can Amazon’s Fire Phone Truly Compete Against The Competition?

On the spec side of things it has what it takes to be relevant.  Sporting a 4.7inch 720p display, powered by a 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 CPU, 2GB of RAM, 2400 mAh battery, a 13MP rear-facing camera w/ OIS + a 2.1MP front-facing shooter, dual stereo speakers w/ Dolby Digital, Wi-Fi, NFC, Bluetooth, etc.  Pretty much everything needed to compete but what about the software experience?  

 

Amazon showed us that they know how to innovate w/ their Dynamic Perspective, Firefly, & Mayday features all found ONLY on the Fire Phone. 

 

• Dynamic Perspective is what they're calling their buttonless UI more or less.  Relying simply on gestures and built-in sensors to give you a cool new way to navigate through your phone like auto scrolling for one-handed reading, access menus/notifications, and more by a twist of your wrist.  

• Firefly is their built-in way to recognize up to 100 million items like text, audio, and images.  So they've found a way to turn the entire world into am augmented reality Amazon store in a nutshell - all from a touch of a button. 

• Mayday is their award-winning take on in-your-face customer service.  This is a free on-device customer service feature that utilizes your front-facing camera to co-pilot through your issues.  This is so awesome especially w/ a response time of 15 seconds or less.  

Also, Amazon has tied up all of their Prime service literally into one bundle w/ the Fire Phone as this was part of their master plan.  For those who pre-order, you get 12-months of Prime for free.  Giving you free 2-day shipping, access to movies/TV shows w/ Amazon Prime Instant Video, access millions of ebooks, magazines, & other periodicals w/ Kindle, audiobooks by Audible, and recently music streaming w/ Prime Music.  

 

 

I think Droid-Life summed the answer to this question lovely w/ this headline.  The Fire Phone is just like the Fire tablets where you are stuck w/ just what's in the Amazon App Store.  There is no type of Google services on board this thing whatsoever.  So no YouTube, no Gmail, no Google Maps, no Google +, no Chrome, no Drive apps, and the list goes on-and-on.  For the general consumer, all of the Amazon services in the world can't make up for a lack of the Play Store.  

 

 

That is pretty much the question many consumers will have to face when considering the Fire Phone.  After you've used all of the built-in software features and searched the Amazon Appstore, then what?  This is not to say that Amazon has a small or weak ecosystem of apps but it doesn't hold a candle to everything Google has to offer in comparison.  Can you go day-to-day without the aforementioned apps and others within the Play Store after everything is said and done?    

 

I'm not confident many can or would want to.  I think for this 1st outing, this is a great look for Amazon BUT needs a better ecosystem to make their experience complete.   Until then, this could go either way as a hit or a miss.