Amazon Fire Phone Pro Reviews

For roughly the same money, you could have a flagship Android smartphone or for a little more per month on contract, a brand new iPhone. If you're looking purely as specs, the Fire phone is fairly mid-range. The deal is sweetened by a year of free Amazon Prime, though, which would otherwise cost you £79 and includes next-day delivery and the Instant Video streaming service. So the Fire phone has a few things going for it, but asking people to get to grips with a new operating system, deal with the limited app store and still pay top dollar for it is a bold move indeed. Ultimately, the safe option is to plump for an Android device such as the LG G3.

Despite that, we’ll give Amazon credit for being original with the experience and sporting a slick looking UI – even though we find dynamic perspective to still be a novel feature. The summer sizzle is ongoing, but the Amazon Fire Phone just isn’t hot enough to be prime time and contend against the other handful of $200 on-contract priced smartphones. Unless Amazon dramatically lowers the price very soon, maybe to around the sub $50 mark, the Fire Phone is going to be seen as an afterthought – following the path of phones like the HTC First.

Just as with the Kindle and the Kindle Fire HDX before it, the Fire Phone's premise is clear: give Amazon customers a straightforward way to consume the retailer's content, as well as buying more of it. Everything, from the UI through Firefly to the clean integration of payment systems and cloud backup, is designed to make consuming easier.You need to be an avid Amazon addict to really make the most of the Fire Phone, however. I use the Amazon app on iOS and Android to make purchases and do price comparisons, and have never found myself thinking "this isn't featured enough"; similarly, the Kindle and Amazon Music apps are sufficient to satisfy my reading and streaming needs. In theory I should be the perfect user for the Fire Phone, but Amazon is arguably a victim of the success of its own existing cross-platform support. Even as a keen Prime subscriber, I don't feel I need what the Fire Phone offers.

Nope. Definitely not. None of the Fire Phone's flaws are totally insufferable, but there's just no reason to suffer them at all. Fire OS is workable but mediocre as a smartphone operating system, and the hardware doesn't bring anything to the table that counteracts that. At a $200 on-contract, $650 unlocked price point you'll be better served with just about any other flagship phone, whether it runs iOS, stock Android, skinned Android, or Windows Phone 8.1. Even with a free year of Amazon Prime bundled in, there are still better options. Go pick up a Moto X or something. You can find it for cheap and it's a better phone. In an alternate universe, it's possible to see how a dirt cheap Fire Phone touting Firefly as its killer feature could have filled some sort of niche need for technology averse Amazon junkies. But as it stands—a premium quality phone with decent but not great software that attempts to hang its hat on a mainly on a gimmick—the Fire Phone isn't something you want in your pocket. Maybe someday, some endeavoring developer will find a truly transcendent use for those four front-facing cameras. But until then, you're better off with just about anything else.