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Originally Posted by tubemonkey
They're running different software versions. When I turn on my Fire HD6 and my Fire HDX 8.9 (2013) they both open to the same home screen. Layout and navigation are identical. Not so with the Fire Phone GSM. Layout and navigation are distinctly different. In addition, the Fire Phone requires downloading a separate app to run Prime Music and Prime Stations is still missing. Why is that?
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The Music app is built-in to both the navigation panel and as a home screen icon, and has the same function as what used to be on Fire tablets prior to Prime Music. It allows access to 'owned' music only. I actually appreciate that they left that in place, and leave you to add Prime Music app on your own (just as you would on a non amazon device). Prime Music can only be authorized on 10 devices at a time, and you can only stream from one such device (I believe this is true even if you stream only music that you 'own'). So this retains access to your own music. If you create a Family Library, you can quickly run into limits around Prime Music access. By contrast, everything is mixed together on Fire tablets, and you cannot easily restrict view to just Prime or just owned music. Some update could well merge everything into 'Music', making it the same as Fire tablet, but we'd be losing a feature.
Fire Phone has navigation features that make it easier to do a number of things more easily with one hand, or without having to tap accurately while moving around. It has a physical Home/task switch button that you can find by touch, and for Back, the sweep up from bottom gesture is much easier to execute than tapping on a 1/2" software button. It has a dedicated camera/firefly button. Moving the phone brings out option panels without having to touch the screen at all. It has a dedicated row of icons so that Phone/Messaging/Email/Browser are always there (as smartphone users expect). Of course the UI is different.
None of these one-handed things work with the larger form factor of Fire, so it cannot benefit from UI designed for that. Conversely there is no justification for restricting Fire Phones navigation and layout to what works well on the tablets and forgoing features that make it easier to operate on the go.
The Fire Phone screen is smaller and so that tabbed category interface of Fire would take up valuable screen real estate and would be difficult to use one-handed. Moving this navigation into a slide-out panel (which can be operated one-handed) makes perfect sense. They have also included shortcut icons for the 11 categories (Apps, Games, Web, Music, Videos, Photos, Books, Newsstand, Audiobooks, Docs, and Shop), for one-touch access. These shortcuts cannot be removed, but you can move them off to a secondary home screen (and/or in a collection) if you use some of them infrequently and want to make room on the main home screen for something else. Since Camera and Firefly can be launched with a button, you can stow their icons away as well.