My expectation and the expectation of my social circle was that Amazon is going to come out with some crazy pricing, subsidizing the phone with future purchases, and offering a 99$ phone, no contract.

All of the tech is neat, but the reaction is more "cool gimmick", not "must have feature". And at that price, "cool gimmick" is not a phone seller. Samsung can pull that off because they pour an insane amount of money into marketing, and have spent years developing the brand to this point. To price yourself at that level, with no market share, competing with gimmicks, seems insane.

The next big winner in market share is going to be someone like Motorola, cheap, great and simple phones, not a new Samsung.

The Amazon brand is all over the place for me.

Great products: Kindle, Fire TV.

Cheap product: Kindle Fire.

Costly product: Fire Phone.

I guess when I see a phone like this with a big Amazon logo on the back: http://a.abcnews.com/images/Business/HT_bgr_amazon_smartphon... I assume it's like a Kindle Fire in that it's a cheap option, but it's not at all, which is confusing. Does Bezos want to make the Amazon brand more valuable? Will consumers really view this device as a peer to the iPhone 5s/6 and Galaxy S5?

Interesting that Bezos is actually dogfooding this phone. Compare that to Facebook's failed attempts at Facebook phone(s) and the "Home" Android effort -- Zuckerberg never gave up his iPhone. Perhaps that's the clearest way to tell when a company is really behind a new product: is the CEO using it?

"But that’s not what the phone is about. It has to stand on its own as a fantastic phone. It even has to make phone calls."

I chuckled here, but seriously, why do we even call these things 'smartphones' anymore? The voice calling aspect has been the forgotten feature for years.

I remember getting a cheap Android phone and the whole dialpad UI would freeze up, or I couldn't answer the damn thing when it rang because the UI was locking up due to god know's what. Mine still lags, but is fast enough to react within about 5 seconds of me pressing a "button". Same for clicking on the voice-command feature.... I hear the audible "ping", and 5 seconds later the display comes up.

Let's be realistic: all smartphones are basically just handheld tablets whose radios/SIMs happen to allow access to voice channels.

I wonder how Firefly is going to work out. Sure, you can scan an item and buy it on Amazon, which is advertised as taking impulse buying to the next level, but what I'm wondering is that if you're standing there, in the store, what could be more impulse buying that just buying the thing right there in the store?

I think making firefly part of the Amazon app, or even as a standalone app, would have more effectively accomplished their "impulse buying" task.

Asking people to switch to a phone with inferior app selection and a clunky UI in order to be immersed in the Amazon experience seems a bit short sighted to me.

High end specs have become a commodity, the top priority the average user has when buying a smartphone is whether it has the apps they use. Try convincing a friend of yours to switch to Windows Phone, and the first thing they'll ask is "does it have x+y apps?" Ecosystem is everything.

Just because you are a tech company doesnt mean you have to make a phone. Whatever happened to that facebook phone?

Or the IBM phone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon

handheld vending machine

I think Amazon is slowly taking a very significant place in this market that previously was dominated by Apple. I myself now have 2 Kindles at home, and a fire TV. Would definitely give the phone a try if my IPhone wasn't new. And he's doing it without buzz..

Here's why Amazon nsde a pho e: 1. To make consumers a part of the Amazon Ecosystem. 2. To make it easiertfor existing users to access the Amazon Ecosystem. 3. To entice Prime User 4. To make it easier to buy anything and everything using Firefly.

Amazon made a phone because it has become a big company with no vision. Making tablets was in, so they made one, making phone is in, they are making one. Maybe in 5 years, making your own VR headset will be in and they will make one as well.

Laughable! what is the cost of 16GB these days? Stopped reading after that answer, but keep going if you like advertorials.

Q. I was surprised that you weren’t competing on price so aggressively. This is essentially the same price as rival devices.

A. Well, it’s 32 gigabytes instead of 16, which is a big deal.....