Amazon Fire may consume shopping time
SEATTLE — Amazon on Wednesday announced a device that tries to fulfill the retailer’s dream of being integrated into consumers’ lives at every possible waking moment — whether they are deciding where to go eat, realizing they need more toilet paper or are intrigued by a snatch of overheard music.
The device is a cellphone, but making calls on it got almost no attention at all at the event here in Seattle where it was unveiled. The Fire phone, the product of fouryears of research and development, offers Amazon fans the chance to live in an Amazon-themed world, where just about every element can be identified, listed, ranked, shared and of course ordered. It offered a view of a mobile future that will be alluring to some but might repulse others.
If the device works as described, and Amazon entices even a small portion of its 250 million active customers to buy them, the Fire could accelerate Amazon’s already intense
competition with other retailers and tech companies, not to mention heightening some of its current battles with suppliers.
As if to underline the nogloves nature of the battle, a promotional video in the first few moments of the presentation took a direct slap at Apple, the leading smartphone maker. Both Apple and Samsung were criticized for having inferior cameras in their devices, and there seemed to be other jabs at technology like Google Glass.
Impulse shopping
The Fire’s product recognition feature, Firefly, “is potentially a real threat to bricks and mortar retailers,” said Rebecca Lieb, an analyst with the Altimeter Group. “Scan a product or listen to music, and you’re delivered straight to the page on Amazon on which you can purchase it. Impulse shopping just went to a new level.”
Amazon’s phone is arriving as the leading tech companies are increasingly trying to develop an array of services and products to keep consumers from wandering, the digital equivalent of Disney not wanting you to leave Disneyland for lunch. So Microsoft brought out a tablet; Facebook tried a phone; Google is experimenting with a shopping and delivery service.
Against such a frenzy of competition and innovation, an Amazon phone was inevitable. The company’s leaders asked themselves only one question, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, told the crowd at the event: “Can we build a better phone for our most engaged customers?”
Next battleground
Bezos touted Firefly heavily as well as something Amazon calls Dynamic Perspective. Cameras on the phone allowthe user to gain another view of a video game or see layered information on amap, like a Yelp review. Whether Dynamic Perspective is a gimmick or something more will depend on how aggressively developers invent new apps for it.
“This is the next big battleground in the ecosystem war,” said Ben Schachter, an analyst with Macquarie. “Amazonis not going to turn the tide decisively in its favor with this, but just needs to establish a beachhead.”
Amazon’s leap into the smartphone business comes as sales of the devices are beginning to mature in the U.S. and Europe.
Their use for shopping, however, is just beginning to explode. In the United States, purchases made with phones will jump more than 25 percent this year to over $18 billion, according to eMarketer. At the moment, most mobile shopping is done with tablets.
Implications
Bezos, for all his zeal, was relatively circumspect about the phone’s ultimate implications. Ralph de la Vega, chief executive of AT&T Mobility, Amazon’s carrier partner, was more direct during a brief appearance on stage.
“I am going to buy a whole lot more things with this technology than I ever have before,” De la Vega said.
The lengthy phone development process for Amazon was partly because of the difficulty of the task. Only Apple and Samsung have found it consistently profitable to make phones.
But Amazon, as always, is operating with a different playbook.