Review: Amazon Fire Phone

The retail giant’s US-only mobile makes

it easier than ever to, er, buy things…

US$649, amazon.com

The retail superfirm’s US-only mission to grab a slice of the telecoms market is more than a tad disappointing.

Amazon’s first Fire phone runs on its own Fire OS version of Android, familiar from the Kindle Fire tablets. The hero feature is Firefly, which… enables you to buy stuff from Amazon more easily. Thanks, guys. Money-grabbing aside, it’s clever: point your camera at a product for insta buy-it-now links. It can also recognize music, movies and TV shows, Shazam- style.

The spec’s fine for an upper-mid-priced phone, although far from flagship quality – 4.7-inch, 720p screen, okay 13-megapixel camera, 2.2GHz Snapdragon quadcore processor with Adreno 330 GPU. The battery gives over a day of general use, which is above average nowadays.

But you will spend half of that time trying to find things in the horribly unintuitive interface. With no menu or back button, common actions are done via gestures, which is a pain to pick up and annoying even once picked up.

If you’re familiar with Amazon’s other devices you may feel at home, but the absence of Google Play, having to flip through endless apps to get the one you want, and the pointlessness of the Fire’s other innovation – Dynamic Perspective, which gives the screen a 3D effect you’ll turn off straight away – mean this really lacks spark. love Easy Amazon shopping. Decent battery life hate Poor interface. Expensive for what you get. Little more than one big advertisement T3 says A potentially decent mobile spoiled by its "USPs"