Kindle Fire Phone - Hands On Review

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by zebradude

Ps. well at least if you can get hungry you can fry eggs on the back of the phone!

Over easy with a side of bacon please

[Barbara1955]

What Temps are these Phones suppose to be, anyway?

[booklover6]

The phone is on sale today WITH CASE for $189. First time they have done this! $16 value.

[Josieb1]

It's also on sale in the UK £99 for 32GB contract free and £179 for the 64GB

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

I wonder if Amazon will ever let the Fire Phone and the Fire Tablets share the same software? If not, this will be the only Fire Phone I'll ever own.

With the latest update, they are running the same version of Android (4.2.2). What exactly are the differences you don't like?

I just got a Fire Phone last week and will be activating it this weekend. I have barely touched my Fire HD6 since setting it up, and don't know why I would even keep the HD6. So far, I like it very much, and it is a vast improvement over my Moto G (which hasn't yet been updated to Lollypop). Remains to be seen if AT&T is better than Sprint in terms of coverage etc (it certainly should be).

The differences with tablet FireOS that I've encountered seem reasonable to me, starting with the lack of 'soft' Back/Home/Task List buttons. They aren't that different.

I'd like to see Goodreads integration. And I wish one didn't have to switch out of scroll mode to use TTS or Narration. Why can't Store pages autoscroll? And I want Bookerly etc. But those are pretty minor issues.

For $80 (assuming you find a year of Prime worth $99), this is a great value, even if you never use it as a phone.

I think there will be 2 new Fire Phones later this year, 'economy' with mostly the same specs only thinner/lighter and lower starting price, and 'premium' with a larger screen and better specs and higher price. But neither of those will be $80 off contract.

Now if they'd only drop the price on the Voyage.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Josieb1

It's also on sale in the UK £99 for 32GB contract free and £179 for the 64GB

Lucky you. When I bought mine last week, the 64GB model was nowhere in sight on amazon US (except with AT&T plan). I think 32GB is enough, though.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by tomsem

With the latest update, they are running the same version of Android (4.2.2). What exactly are the differences you don't like?

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?

[tomsem]

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?

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.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by tomsem

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. etc...

I'm glad it works for you. For me, it doesn't. I still fail to see why the phone has to be different from the tablet. The Nexus 4 operates the same way as the Nexus 7 and my LG Volt operates the same way as my Galaxy Tab 4.

Oh well, to each his own.

Still left unresolved is why Prime Stations is missing from a flagship device.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by tomsem

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.

Some excellent points why I love this phone! I use mine as a phone seldom listen to music on it but love that when you do and get a call the music stops till you hang up then it resumes where it left off.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

I'm glad it works for you. For me, it doesn't. I still fail to see why the phone has to be different from the tablet. The Nexus 4 operates the same way as the Nexus 7 and my LG Volt operates the same way as my Galaxy Tab 4.

Oh well, to each his own.

Still left unresolved is why Prime Stations is missing from a flagship device.

I do think they will get around to merging Prime Music so it is a built-in feature rather than just being another Android app (which at this point does not support Prime Stations). Or the Android app may get Prime Stations before that. I think there are enough Fire Phones out there to justify continued support in the form of updates.

I used to worry a lot more about Amazon abandoning devices (case in point: the first two Fire tablet generations) but they seem to have finally figured out that it is cheaper in the long run to update everything to the same version/feature set. Devices that nobody wants to use are a liability since Amazon doesn't make much selling devices.

[Blossom]

I think Prime stations are coming as the regular Android app has it now, So the phone should get it soon.

[Barbara1955]

Well when my Prime Membership runs out I get to save space by Deleting the Prime Music Apps & hopefully some of the other junk! So no I wouldn't want them Permanently fixed taking up space.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Blossom

I think Prime stations are coming as the regular Android app has it now, So the phone should get it soon.

So Google Play version is 4.4.5 OTA (#40511) [last updated May 26, 2015]. The version on my Fire Phone is 4.3.1 OTA (#30210) [says it was updated May 30 but that is actually the date I installed it so it is probably much older than that], and in My Apps, says it can only be delivered to Fire Phone. Then the one listed in Amazon Appstore is '4.4.4' (but is not 'compatible' with Fire Phone), and the description doesn't say anything about Prime Stations. The Product listing says it is only compatible with my Android devices, but in My Apps, it says it can be delivered to my Kindle Fire (1st gen) as well (but won't let me actually deliver it to any device). I don't have that device handy to see which information is true.

However, I would like to have a version optimized for Fire Phone, i.e. one that responds to the rotate gestures like the built in Music app (which the current Prime Music app for Fire Phone does not do). Except that the built in Music app doesn't currently put play controls in the notification tray as I would expect; you have to find them on the lock screen, or use a headset button, or bring the app to foreground.

What a mess. I trust it will get sorted eventually but my expectations are not that it will be soon. I have a couple of things to ask the Mayday people about, I may mention this as well.

[Blossom]

The Play version has Prime Stations don't know about the one on Amazon App Store. I know The Fire Phone version was updated a month ago but no stations yet.