Version History: Fire Phone

Hey there, I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am about to play you another episode of our new show, Version History, all about old technology and the most important moments and products in the history of tech. If you like the show... Please make sure to subscribe to Version History wherever you get podcasts, or you can find it in the Verge channel on YouTube. Hit us up with all of your feedback. I hope you enjoy. It's 2010-ish.

The iPhone is a huge hit. Android is starting to dominate the global smartphone market. Those phones are boring. When you squeeze on the side of them. Nothing happens when you go to take a picture. They only have one camera or two cameras. They don't have five or six and you want five or six. You also want when you kind of lean off to the side, you want something to happen on your phone and nothing is happening on your phone.

Plus, let's be honest, aren't phones mostly for shopping? Put all of this together. And of course, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, decided he just had to do something. And that something is called the Fire Phone. From The Verge and Vox Media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in the history of technology. Today, we are going to talk about a whole bunch of bad ideas about how to build a smartphone.

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All right, we're back. It's Fire Phone time. The greatest phone in the... I'm just kidding. It's the Fire Phone. Allison Johnson is here with me. Hi, Allison. Hello. Sean O'Kane, also here. Hi, Sean. We are an interesting group to talk about the Fire Phone. And I'm very excited about this because...

You and I worked on a bunch of Fire Phone stuff together a million years ago at The Verge. I think we went around to various stores shopping for things together, is my memory of this. Yes, I believe so. Yeah, it was bad times. We'll get to that. Allison, we should say right up top, you were working at Amazon. You were at DP Review, which is like Amazon's here, DP Review is like here. But it was technically part of Amazon at the time of the Fire Phone. Yes. Do you have any incredible...

gossip you'd like to share. I do not. I can't even think if I saw a fire phone on campus at any point. Like that's kind of damning. But yeah, didn't have anything to do with that. I was. A little upset at what it did to the stock price and my compensation, but, you know, it's okay. Yeah, you know, you can't win them all. But you are now a phone reviewer, and I'm very curious.

If the Fire Phone has literally ever come up in your thinking as a phone reviewer. It's so funny because there's certain things you can bring up in the company of like.

People who care about phones and the phone reviewers will be like Moto Mods and everyone's like, oh, that was such a fun idea. Nobody has ever said anything like that about the Fire Phone. I don't think it's ever spoken about. I think it's just like such a weird blip. In the history of phones, it was like, huh, what was that? This is part of the reason I find this phone so fascinating is it was like it was Amazon.

It was a huge deal. I remember when it came out and we were covering it, it was a big deal. There was a ton of buildup. We spent a long time covering it. We have eight different videos of it that we made over time. And then, like you're saying, just instantly gone. like wiped from the history of smartphones. Jeff Bezos got in a car and drove the Amazon phone just right off a cliff. Just like we're here. It's it exists. And goodbye. So I just want to like.

go back through the story of how this happened. And I will just, the subtitle of our story here is Jeff Bezos makes a lot of bad decisions all in a row. And it's very exciting.

And we were all there for a lot of this. So I want to see what you guys remember of some of these moments. But I think the place we should start is probably in 2007, which is like way before the actual story of the fire film. I do think it matters. That's the year Amazon launches the Kindle, which is like its first big hardware play, goes very well. And it's also the same year that Apple launches the iPhone.

which obviously is the iPhone. So we have a clip of those two things side by side. And I just want to play you sort of the juxtaposition of what these two companies launched in the course of a few months. And I don't even mean this is a burn. They're just doing different things. Let me just play this for you. Welcome to Kindle, Amazon's new wireless reading device that lets you read books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs anywhere, anytime. And we are calling it iPhone.

Today, today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone. Yeah, so. Like slightly different ambitions there. We have a dude who walks out and he's like, yeah, we made a Kindle. He looked like he was about to teach me like a nine episode like online course about it. tax reform or something. Yeah, he's going to train you on security at HR. Or like, yeah, an internal HR sort of yearly thing that you have to watch. That's what that vibe was. Yeah. But so...

This is like the beginning of Amazon being a hardware company. Amazon's already like big and successful at this point. But a thing that I've discovered is that you guys know about Lab 126. Yeah. Yeah. So this is the like hardware skunkworks inside of Amazon that I feel like every time we hear about it is either like.

hiring a million people for some weird project or like doing giant layoffs. Yeah. Those are the two times Lab 126 comes in the news. But evidently when Bezos set it up, the plan was to make lots of hardware. uh they were like they they did the kindle uh apparently music players was a plan which i find sort of fascinating it was supposed to be like projects for every letter of the alphabet right like and that was the name lab 126 was one to 26 in the alphabet

Which is just like, let's scattershot in every direction. But there's a certain set of those that actually like make sense. Like I read music players. I'm like, oh, I totally get that. Especially, you know, Amazon Music started to come, but they wanted to sell stuff. And it's like, OK, you could do.

You could do an iPod thing if you're Amazon. That actually makes a lot of sense. And at that point, there was a bunch of reporting that said they were not going to build a phone. Just not interested. Couldn't do it. Apple and Google were already way ahead. at this point like 2008 2009 really the iphone's taking off android's taking off there's just kind of no room but then apparently what happens uh and this is a story we've heard

400 million times is Amazon starts to feel like its turf is being encroached on by Apple and Google who are, this is around the time Apple launched iBooks, which is straight up a thing I forgot existed. Right. Did you guys know Apple sells books?

I actually use a lot. Do you? Yes. Why? What's wrong with you? Because I just I'm in a place in my life where reading a physical book with like a light, you know, it's just like I'm not I don't have a lot of time to do that. So I use my phone a lot more. That's where I use it. I don't trust that. We'll leave that alone. But anyway, Google is also getting into books. And so Amazon is starting to feel like its thing is being taken away from it, which is sort of a fun counterfactual. Like if.

If those companies had not been interested in books, if Amazon would have just been like, we're cool. We'll just do Kindle forever. Everything's chill. Yeah. Like, don't worry about it. You guys do phones. We'll do Kindle. Basically the same thing. No problem whatsoever. So.

All of this is happening. And then Amazon launches the Kindle Fire, which was the tablet. Right. And that, if I'm remembering correctly, was like pretty successful pretty fast. Yeah. I mean, Apple at the time was doing the iPad. some of the other companies like samsung were doing similarly styled tablets um metal chamfered edges and all that and the fire tablets always felt a bit more approachable something you could hand to a kid and so

And they were cheap. They were crucial. They weren't good ever. I remember being really annoyed at the Silk browser. Oh, my God. Just the name of it. It's so gross. Irritating. Yeah. And they really wanted to sell you apps. And it was like Amazon was deep into like we are going to be.

an android platform at the size of android if i can understand at the time not wanting to dive right into phones because not only is it an immense hardware challenge for a lot of reasons this is also the time when like you can't go do that unless you you know, hobnob with Verizon. You have to have these deep relationships with those companies in order to do that. So it's like two very big problems to solve. Yeah. And for Amazon, which is like, I think still kind of famously likes to just.

do its own thing entirely. Yeah. That's messy. Hug itself. It's just like, leave us alone. We're just going to be over here. I'm surprised they didn't launch their own carrier. Like, we are announcing, like... you know, cell networks, towers, everything. That's a fun alternate history. I know. I mean, it's actually funny to think about because one of the big things about the first Kindle.

was that it had that always on 3G so that you could buy books wherever you were. And it was free. And that was like one of the big last minute Bezos changes. He was like, people should be able to buy books anywhere. So like fast forward a few years and actually launching a carrier would have like made a lot of sense. It kind of.

What if? Yeah. Can you imagine like Verizon, AT&T and just prime? Jeff Bezos could have been John Leisure. Imagine. What he would have taken from this. Oh, no. Truly, truly the dream. But so right around this time, 2010. Kindle Fire comes out. Like you said, the iPhone and Android are really taking off. The iPad is out. The Kindle Fire is out. This is when apparently Amazon decides to start making a phone. And it started with a Jeff Bezos memo.

I don't know if you guys... I feel like this is like legend at this point. Amazon does these six-page memos, and the beginning of every meeting is everybody sits quietly and reads the memos, which to me sounds like a nightmare. Just full nightmare. Let's all sit quietly for 20 minutes in this meeting and read. Imagine you're the person who wrote it and you have to sit there for 20 minutes and like sweat. Like, what do they think? So Bezos writes this thing. And his big point in the memo is that.

Amazon needed a more direct relationship with its users and he was particularly worried about what would happen to Amazon when Android and the iPhone sort of dominated and got in the middle of that.

which i would say historically speaking super good call like right the correct thing to be worried about at the time being intermediated by smartphone platforms yeah but it's also i think just the start of the problem with this thing is like the amazon's whole thing is like start with the customer and it has to be the customer and then you work from that and like

This 100 percent started with Amazon freaking out like, oh, God, we got to get in here, you know. So I don't know. Red flag. Yeah, I agree. And again, from from what I understand, this is still in a lot of ways about books. And they're like.

If people want to buy Kindle books on their iPhone, that's awesome. We're psyched about that. We just want people to buy stuff. But now Apple's taking 30 percent and we can't do it like this became the problem for years that you just couldn't buy a book in the Kindle app because Apple wouldn't allow it. And so Amazon is like, we need a business case around this, not like an elegant product solution. So anyway, so Lab 126 starts making a phone.

Like kind of right then and there, they're like, we're going to make a phone. And by all accounts, Bezos was like unusually involved in this thing from like the jump, which I think is not. Like everybody talks about Steve Jobs being like intimately involved, but I feel like everything we hear is that that's sort of an anomaly and that having the CEO just like wander into the design lab being like, what are you guys doing?

Especially in the product development space. Like, I think we hear a lot about CEOs who come in to help fix problems or, you know, alter the course of something. But from like inception, from especially at a place. you know i don't i don't know a lot about lab when she's 126 but i think about something like that as like you know an incubator team they are supposed to be like hashing out good ideas bad ideas and to have that presence looking over your shoulder as you're

trying to brainstorm, which usually works better in like a freer environment, has got to be a weird vibe. Especially when what he's telling you is, do 3D things. Oh God, just shouting 3D. Yeah, you're like, what if our phone was good and Jeff Bezos is just behind you?

And he's like, pretty. Yeah. Sure, Jeff. But so he apparently was like, he picked the feature list, which I find really fascinating. And sort of to your point where you're saying a minute ago, like one of the things there's a really great. Fast Company story from a bunch of years ago with a lot of really good reporting on what happened here. And the thing it lands on over and over is that, like, this phone was made for and by Jeff Bezos, which is...

bad product strategy. And I think this is like what you're saying about Amazon, to its credit, is very good at figuring out what people want. Sometimes that is problematic for lots of reasons. people would like cheap things that they don't pay much money for has all kinds of problematic downstream effects but it is true but in this case it doesn't seem like anybody was like what

should a phone do that would be cool. Also, he's on a run at this time. I think it's important to keep that in mind. He not only built up Amazon and went beyond books to everything, he builds up AWS, which people were like, what's that going to be for? How big is that really going to be? Becomes this behemoth. The Kindle actually turned into a series of really great products that people really love. So like, I mean, that's like.

Almost like worst case scenario. If he's going to come up with an idea or demand something that winds up being a bad idea, that's bad. That's not good at all. And he had prime under his belt at this point, too. Yeah. So he's got so many.

He's looking bulletproof. Yeah. Yeah. I do wonder if he's like feeling himself at this moment. Absolutely. Yeah. He's like, oh, I want to make a phone. I can make fun. And he was out, you know, more personally, he's transitioned out of this sort of like geeky, awkward CEO and is starting to turn into the like, I'm a very forward facing.

Kind of, you know, he hadn't really buffed up at that point, but, you know, we're on that path. We're getting there. We're like, Jeff is in the gym at this point, for sure. There's no question. And so apparently, from what I understand, Jeff Bezos' big idea for... the Amazon smartphone, was what if it did everything? Yeah. Famously a great idea. So they talked about things like NFC. They wanted to do gesture interactions, which I think.

I don't know, every company on Earth has tried at some point and is never a good idea. But they're like, we're going to do it anyway. They wanted to do a force sensitive grip. that you could like, depending on how you held the phone, it would do different stuff. It was literally like every idea that every smartphone manufacturer has ever had. Jeff was like, ship it.

And the people at Lab 126 were like, it's bad. And he was like, ship it anyway. Because I think their idea was, and I'm trying to remember back to how true this was in like 2012 and 13, that. These phones were so not commoditized, but so entrenched already that if you wanted to get somebody out of the like droid ecosystem or off of the iPhone, that you had to do something spectacular.

I don't know that I feel that way. Like, I look back at some of the stuff I was reading at the time, and it was like, oh, the HTC One is great. And I'm like, was that that hard to quit? I don't know. I think it was. We were starting to get, you know, not not anywhere as entrenched as people are now, I think. But I think that was really forming, especially with the like walk into your carrier and by the phone. You're like.

I'll just get the new version of whatever I had before. And those habits, I think, were picking up for sure. Yeah, in a weird way, it was more like a level playing field for weird ideas to compete against some of those other companies because...

of that carrier relationship and because there wasn't such a focus on like outright price you knew you were going to be paying around 200 for pretty much anything and so like there was a bit more freedom for some of those other companies even beyond when the fire phone

eventually flopped like there was just such a you mentioned the moto mods before my mind always goes to the lg flex where like lg made a phone that like you could bend like sick awesome you know like so there was just a lot more it was so less hegemonic than it is today. And so I could see where...

You know, a powerful CEO who controls your future can probably impress on people that we need a lot of these weird ideas in a phone like this. So, OK, so all of that is going on, but there are three features I really want to talk about. The first feature, and we have this phone here. I encourage you to try it for yourself because there's truly wild stuff going on. The first one was called dynamic perspective. This was, at least in Jeff Bezos' mind, this was the feature of the phone.

Forget all the rest of it. This was going to be the thing that blew everybody's mind. And it had four IR projectors, one in each corner of the front of the phone, that basically figured out where you were, and it would reorient the display. as you moved her head around. So it was a 3D effect. And Allison is fully distracted by doing it right now. I've stopped listening. But like...

Like, look at this. It's like legitimately, it works. It's pretty cool. Well, how do you define works in your daily life? That didn't work. I mean, again, another one of those. I just went to show this to Jean and it froze. It was, things were moving. I saw a pyramid. You got stuff going on? It's like you're looking into the phone. I mean, again, in a vacuum, it seems like a weird thing to impress on this coterie of designers in Lab 126. Sure.

The 3DS was out. 3D movies were happening. You know, there was a time in my life where I remember being maybe a little too high and watching Transformers and 3D on a 3D TV and being like. this is actually going to make movies better because people have to act better because they look like they're right in front of me. So I get it. As long as you sit with...

the right glasses in front of the right television watching the right thing directly in the center. Yeah. As long as you do that, it's going to be great. And you're not offended by 48 frames a second. Oh, God. So these ideas are in the ether. I think we're probably...

going to speak pretty critically about this thing in a moment, but like it is not surprising to me that this was a thing that was a priority in Mr. Bezos. OK, but sure. Put yourself in Jeff Bezos's mind. All right. What is this for? I mean, that's the well, that's the question I feel like we won't be able to answer here today or ever, if only because like so much of the reporting, like you said, from from the time was that he.

wanted all of these things and it was characterized by people who worked on this phone as being for him and yet like i don't know man is there ever a version of this product before it got released or after it got released where you could really see him like

setting down whatever blackberry curve he was using and like picking this up or iphone for whatever you know whatever he had and i i don't think i ever remember even at the time being like oh yeah he's definitely daily drivering like this like this is not this is he's probably testing it out, but it is not his main device. Yeah, this phone reminds me a little bit of, do you remember that Alexa event?

I don't know, five or six years ago where they just launched like 75 different Alexa devices all at once where they're just like a microwave and a clock and other appliances. And there's like every imaginable thing. And they just kind of got up on stage and they're like, does any, do you like any of this?

Yeah, that's what this phone feels like to me. We don't need Lab 126. You guys pick. Yeah, I mean, there's just too much going on in this phone. But I think the dynamic perspective thing ends up being sort of the story of this phone in a lot of ways. Because on the one hand... They added four new cameras to the phone, which is expensive. It apparently was just decimating to battery. And my one memory of what you could actually do with it, other than like, it was a very cool party trick.

It actually still is a cool party trick looking at it now. The thing where you can just like move your head and the home screen appears to move. Like, that's cool. Would I buy a phone for that? No, but it's cool. But I do remember, I think it was in the Maps app. If you were like looking at a place and you sort of tilted it or moved your head, it would show you more information. It would like open the place data. Sure. About that, which again, like, is that anything? Yeah. I don't think so.

Do you guys know that thing where you're zooming in on Google Maps and you can't get the one street to show up? Yes. You're like trying to get one street name. Yes. And there's no amount of pinching and zooming that like gets it. I'm imagining that, but like tilting your head with a phone.

Like, that sounds like the most frustrating experience. You just hold the phone here and you're like, is that Russell Road? Yeah. Yeah. You're like, how far over do I need to lean to see the name of the road I'm heading for? I cannot tell you how much.

Better, it makes me feel to know that other people have this problem with Google Maps. Oh, my gosh. How much time do you have? And it's only ever the road you're looking for. It's like, here, would you like every surrounding road available to you? Idea for Google.

Don't do that. Show the names. Yeah. What a world. Show them. Yeah. So, okay. So that's dynamic perspective. 3D. I think you're probably right to be slightly generous. This was the moment 3D was going to be the thing. Other people did 3D smartphones. Technically speaking, this is as good a version of it as probably anybody shipped. Well, yeah. One of one. It's just for nothing. So that was feature number one. Feature number two was this thing called Mayday. You guys remember this?

This was the always-on customer service line. Yeah, which they had done with their Kindles, I think. It had some ground that they were— Maybe they spun it out of Lab26 and put it on the Kindles first, but I know it was something that they were working towards. Yeah, and I think the idea was—

if I'm remembering it right, you could actually, like, they could take over your phone and, like, show you how to do stuff, right? Yeah. And quickly, like, the idea was to have a response time within, like, 10 or 15 seconds, which, you know, if five people buy your phone, then... That's doable. Also, it's a really good idea to start from the jump

saying we need always-on support stuff for our phone that no one understands. Yeah, you're like, hi, we made this thing. Customer service is great. Our returns, you're going to love them. You're going to freak out about how easy it is to return your phone. Who? Why? Red flags everywhere. So that I kind of always thought was ridiculous. But like, sure. But the third thing was this feature called Firefly, which I would argue is the one.

single right idea that jeff bezos had in the entirety of making this phone and i don't know if you guys remember this but this was the you would you would either press there was a dedicated button on the side and you would press it to just launch the camera. But if you pressed and held, it would...

have all these little like dots flying around on the screen. Am I remembering this right? Yes. I have like fever dreams of being in Walgreens using the Fire Phone. I ordered a bunch of toilet paper by accident one time. That was like, I should, that was my whole Fire Phone review. It's like, why did this thing ship me toilet paper? But the Firefly thing, its whole job was to basically see the world and help you shop for stuff, which is.

everybody's idea about AI in the year 2025. It was also very much Amazon's idea at the time. Remember all the weird peripherals they were making at this same time that did make it out into the world before the Fire Phone did, which is like the... dash wand i think this was the reason that in the run-up because one of the things that was really sort of illuminating me and trying to read up ahead of um ahead of this and remembering so much about this was we spent years hearing about

And honestly, seeing and getting good reporting about this phone, like it's actually kind of really funny to look back at all the stuff that was leaked. ahead of this phone getting out there and how it's such a different world from today where that probably would not happen in any capacity like we knew about this sort of 3d feature we knew about the nfc stuff we knew about

You know, shopping, like there was so much about the phone that was known. The phone itself leaked at one point, although in sort of like a dev case, which, you know, arguably made it look better. And, you know, I think there was such a hum about it for so long that it became this inevitability. And I think people started to rationalize by looking at all the other stuff Amazon was doing, including with the Echo at the time, because the Echo was coming out.

And saying like, oh, they're just looking for all these different ways to like make it quicker for you to get to them to buy stuff. And that, you know, people weren't really exactly sure how that was going to work on the phone, but it was just like, all right, this is what they do now.

not only will they make it easier for you but they'll also get they'll be better off by funneling you through fewer choices right like that was the big thing with the echo it was like if i ask it to buy me more toilet paper amazon's just gonna get to pick the one that like gets them the most money right stuff like that and so i think people just saw this as like this will be the next extension of that kind of model that they were building yeah it's a weird thing to think about now because

That idea that ultimately everything is just about shopping felt so like gauche in 2014. In a way that like, yeah, now everything is pretty much just about shopping. Like the stuff, the shows that you watch on the Internet are now mostly about shopping. And our devices are increasingly pushing us to shopping. And the only way anybody can make money on AI or search is.

about shopping. So it's like we're just we're just down this hole of like maybe Amazon was right that actually everything you own is just going to try to get you to buy more stuff. But not this one. Not this one. Not through Amazon. But I think the Firefly thing was like, it didn't work, which is a bit of a problem. It was hit or miss at best. So I remember...

Alex, Heath, and our team got a demo of the Meta's Orion glasses a while back. And when he was trying them, one of the things it does is identify objects around you. And everybody's using it now for like... or for, you know, remembering where you left her keys or whatever, but the technology is the same. It's just object recognition with a camera. And it would do, it had a big, I forget what it was, but it was like a bag of dates.

that just said dates in huge font across the front. And the glasses were like, I think those are dates. And it's like, oh, great job, Orion. You did it. Mission accomplished. And there's a bunch of that in the Fire Phone, too, that it was like...

I had a bunch of notes from when I was testing that it was like, I would go into a bookstore and if it said the title in gigantic letters, it would find it on Amazon. And if it said it in small letters, it wouldn't find it on Amazon. And it's like, this is, we're just not there.

Yeah, so Firefly, I think, was like the closest thing they had to a good idea. But again, we've made a... a series of decisions and features here and not a single one of them is like, oh, this would be a cool thing to have in a phone. I want to know what didn't make it. Oh, my gosh. These are things that eventually make it to the phone. Like, what were the things that they were like, no, thank you. Squeeze controls.

the the like you know haptic thing or whatever i think that may i honestly think that might be i don't even remember anymore but it might be but you know what is funny is the so as this is all happening this is like 2011 12 13 this is all kind of happening There was also an idea inside of Amazon that maybe we should build, instead of the fancy phone, we should build a cheap phone.

And that was like, maybe what people actually want is something much simpler and more straightforward and less expensive and not full of weird features no one wants. The two... paths were codenamed Duke was the high end one. And the cheap one was called Otis. And Duke ended up winning. And the big idea, as I understand it, was that Jeff Bezos really wanted Amazon to be like a lifestyle brand. This is the idea at this point is like.

Amazon, and I think this is true thinking back to how I felt about Amazon at the time. Amazon was like big and successful, but not like cool. And I think. frankly still to this day i think amazon like desperately wants to be cool yeah in a way that it isn't important to distinguish that from like beloved or like relied upon like i think it's always been

Most of those things like people actually, despite some of the things that people don't like about Amazon, broadly, people really love the services that it offers. Those things do not translate to. cultural cachet or cool or whatever you want to call it. Right. They are very different things. Well, and what's funny is in a lot of ways that is like the secret to Amazon's success, right, is it does these deeply unsexy things like.

relentlessly iterate on shipping logistics. Like, holy God, no one cares. But the idea that I can order a thing at night and it arrives at my house at 6 a.m. the next morning, again, lots of... downstream problems but that's awesome and that's the kind of thing like aws is like that uh even the kindle is like that it was always kind of utilitarian and straightforward but it's not trying to be like neat and fun it's just like this is a

thing that's kind of like paper for reading books. Amazon's good at that. That's a good thing to be good at. That's why when you hear the story of like, oh, this was Jeff's baby, they were designing this for Jeff Bezos, like it rings so true because this feels like a phone for a personality and not the business ethos of Amazon.

That's like, get down into the nitty gritty and just give people what they want. Totally. Yeah, I totally agree. So, okay, so now let's get to 2014. It's June of 2014. Amazon invites a bunch of people to an event. Doesn't really tell them why. But along with the invites, everybody gets a copy of the book, Mr. Pine's Purple House. Do you guys know anything about this book? Only that he brought it up on stage. Yeah. So this book.

Let me see. I wrote this down because I want to make sure I get it right. The book is about a guy named Mr. Pine who is desperate for his house to stand out from his neighbors. He lives on a street of like samey houses and he wants his house to look cool. So he plants a tree. But then so does everybody else. Everybody's like, oh, great tree. I'll put a tree in my yard too. And then his house is the same again. So on and on they go. And then eventually, Mr. Pine paints his house purple.

And everybody looks at his house and goes, oh, that's so nice. And they decide to paint their own house, but they all painted a different color. And so everybody stands out and they all look great together. the moral of that story is something. Oh no. But so that's, everybody gets a note from Bezos basically inviting him to this event and an invite comes with a book.

which I don't think has ever happened to me before or since. Apple didn't do the Vision Pro. They didn't send you Ready Player One. That's a good idea. And we need to take a break, but then when we come back, we're going to launch this damn thing. We'll be right back. Oh, hey, welcome to gift wrapping.

Whoa, Zoe Saldana. Hey, can you wrap these, please? Wow, iPhone 17s. You splurged. At T-Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So...

I have to trade in my old phone, right? No, at T-Mobile, there's no trade-ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone, too, for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with... Hey, where are you going? To T-Mobile! Thanks, Zoe!

The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Get four iPhone 17s on us. No trading needed when you switch. Plus four lines for just $25 a line. All right, we're back. So it's June 18th, 2014. So specific. We're in Seattle at Fremont Studios. You're from Seattle. Do you know anything about Fremont Studios? What is Fremont Studios? I think you have events there, like a nice wedding.

Yeah, maybe an improv show. Not like Bezos nice, but like pretty nice. It's kind of like maybe sort of artsy. I've never been, honestly. This is what I've, the context clues I've pieced together about it. Fair enough. So they've invited all these people. They've all read the book. And then Jeff Bezos gets up and launches the thing. And I have a clip from the launch that I would like to play for you. Here you go. Can we build? He starts with a picture of this book. I just want to point that out.

See, look, we're like not quite at RIP, Jeff, but we're getting there. No, and at least we're on stage. And hold the Firefly button and start recognizing things. Phone number. Start recognizing things. QR code. CD. Recognize an Earl, kosher salt, barcode, kind bars. I have a Nutella lover in my house and dishwashing detergent. I'm telling you, it is addictive and it is an absolute breakthrough.

AT&T executive. I'm going to buy a whole lot more things with this technology than I ever have before. We're also kicking things off with 12 months of Amazon Prime included. Sure. All right. So that...

I just want to say is not like a cherry picked bad part of the keynote. No, it's all this. And it's long. It's like an hour and a half of it. Yeah. There's such a preamble, too, before he goes through a whole history of how good Amazon is, how many people shop with Prime. His mom is in attendance. I mean, I know it's in Seattle, but he brought his...

He's like, hey, mom, this one, I really did it. We really went and got it. You got to come check this out. I built a purple house. Oh, no. But yes, it's I mean, the like the takeaways there are again. Anyone who has not watched the demo of Firefly, all of it is just like a big ass giant jar of Nutella that says Nutella in huge letters. And just spoiler alert, that's not hard technology. It's just not hard technology.

Maybe this wasn't at the time yet, but they made a Firefly app. You could go do this on other phones. Because like what you said, like the thing that I remember the most about the Firefly piece of this is that whoever, you know. Props to whoever made this Inside Lab 126. The animation of it is so much fun. Oh, it's great. Like the little like Firefly things flying around and they like hone in on the little details. Even when it doesn't work, it felt delightful. But it was like, you know, it's...

It didn't work. But just him turning on the app and pointing at it and something and going, let's recognize some stuff. It just kills me every time. It's like, Jeff, I don't think that's a thing people do on their phones. It's like I get together with my friends and we just recognize some stuff. What is this jar of Nutella? Yeah. Anyway, that just, so like, that's the vibe. And as you noticed, Sean, that's AT&T. This thing shipped only from AT&T. Right.

Why did we ever do carrier exclusives? This is the worst. This never worked for anyone. It kind of worked for the iPhone, but not really. The iPhone got way more popular when it stopped being a carrier exclusive. It was like legacy from the way phones had been sold, right? Because for old, you know.

for how long as cell phones started to take off like there were some ones that people knew like the razor or whatever but and like i guess like lg the chocolate like there were some phones that people knew but otherwise it was sort of like Most people didn't know what LG was or whoever made the singular wireless phones. It was just like you knew you needed a phone, so you went to the phone place. And so it was sort of like a legacy of that. And I think as part of the smartphone...

coming on the scene that was naturally going to be more expensive. It was a way to get people to want to pony up that amount of money. Because one of the things I was reading up on this was it was $199, the Fire Phone, with the two-year contract with AT&T.

And I wasn't sure if there even was a price, but I guess the standalone price, if you could have bought it off, I don't know that you could, but if you could have bought it off contract was like $650. Yeah. Which, yeah, at that time felt like a ton of money. And the crazy thing is that they were.

Like in all of the coverage of this at the time, including our own, it talked about this as an expensive phone. Oh, right. You know, and it's like that plus like the way they talk about it on stage at this reveal event. in the most like gushing terms, like lovingly created and like all this stuff. It was just like, man, what a weird transitional moment. Yeah. There's just this sense of like, we've done something spectacular and new, which.

like we've been talking about, is just so against everything that Amazon stands for. Yeah. And I like, it sounds mean, but it's not. But like Amazon, Amazon's thing is that it is cheap and good. And that is, like, the tablets are such a good example of this. Like, I see Kindle Fire tablets everywhere. Yeah, we have one for my son. I think that's what most people do. Yeah, and, like, they work fine for the stuff that you need a tablet to do. They're, like...

I mean, they're dirt cheap most of the time. You can buy the big, giant, blue case that'll prevent anything from bad happening to it. And it's like, that works. And so the idea that like... I'm so hung up on this thing where inside of Amazon there was also a cheap phone. And if there had been an Amazon phone that had been like $0 on contract and was also geared towards making you buy a bunch of stuff, part of me is like...

maybe that would have been a giant hit. That was one of the things they considered, to your point, and even almost like an inverse of what wound up happening, which was that there was the idea at one moment that they would give you a cheaper phone as part of being a Prime member.

Oh, interesting. So instead of selling you the phone that they wound up selling and giving you Prime for free, it was the other way around. And it would be something probably smaller or cheaper and not laden with as much intensive.

battery and processing tech like am i crazy or does that pitch make way more sense no that and it sounds more amazonian like the the thing of like you just end up with an echo because they're on sale for Zero dollars and you ordered something on Amazon. Yeah. Like a fire phone shows up at your house and, you know, my mom's like, well, I don't want to buy a phone anyway. So now I have this thing. And yeah, there's like another timeline.

where maybe that worked and then led to something else bigger and grander. It would have been a shorter presentation, though. Jeff Bezos wouldn't have had so much space to delve into the 600 years of... perspective and horizons and in artwork yeah i always this was i think like

peak everybody trying to do Apple launches. Oh, clearly. All right, so Allison, I'm going to read you a list of specs. Okay. And you're going to tell me if this sounds like an impressive phone. You ready for this? I'm ready for it. The Fire Phone had a 4.7-inch 720x1280 screen.

I honestly don't hate it. Yeah, it's fine. It's kind of the right size for a phone, but that's a whole other thing. A little small, but it's in this phone. 720p, though. I will say there is something about holding this phone that is very nice. All these years later. It had a Snapdragon 800 chip and two gigs of RAM. A whole two gigs. Yeah. For, you know, we're killing it here. A 13 megapixel rear camera and a 2.1 megapixel front camera.

Oh, my God, you couldn't even find a two megapixel camera now. Like those little macro cameras are five megapixels. Yeah. It came with between 32 and 64 gigs of storage, which I remember at the time didn't feel like a lot. Yeah. And that was a very long time ago. Oh, no. And it had a 2400 milliamp hour battery. Oh, so tiny with all those cameras. Yeah. So this was apparently the biggest problem with dynamic perspective is like the two things that sucked about it were.

it as a concept and that it was apparently it was just totally destructive of the battery, which makes sense. You're firing five cameras at all times. And it encourages you to just keep doing it. Like, you're just going to keep your screen on. Keep looking at it. Keep messing with it. Don't do anything on your phone. Just look at it for a while. That's what everybody wants. It's great for battery to do that.

So this thing comes out. It's exclusive to AT&T. I fix it. Tore it down and gave it actually relatively high marks for some of the technology they put in. I would point out that iFixit doesn't use the phone. They just rip it apart. Yes. And in terms of what happens when you open it up. I mean, we're impressed. That's fine. Yeah. Listen, it looks like it looks like a phone that you can repair easily. Like it is it is built.

That way. There is no Johnny Ive at Lab 2126. That's a good point. We should talk about this for a minute. And Allison, you're the phone reviewer in the group here. What do you make of this thing in front of us just as a piece of hardware? I, you know, it's... It doesn't feel bad to me. It is just instantly smudged. You breathe on this thing the wrong way. It's so smudged. I'm so sorry. It's gross. And I just put lotion on my hands. Yeah, it's all over.

No, like it has kind of like a, it's simple, it's, you know, minimalist, if you want to call it that, without looking at all the cameras that are in front of you. Like, I don't hate it. I think it's kind of, it feels. relatively lightweight probably because there's like the world's tiniest battery in it um it it definitely it doesn't feel like a purple house though you know like it doesn't really stand out in any way where i'm like

this is a cool and different phone. It's just sort of like, yeah, this seems like a phone from about, you know, that era. It is absent of flair. Yeah. Like it is just so straightforward. from an exterior design perspective. Right. Which I think only enhances the ick factor of the operating system and the software when you turn the thing on. You have nowhere else to look. Yeah. I really do like truly...

loathe how well you can see all of the cameras. Yes. It's the thing to me that makes it look just like a prototype of a phone and not a phone. Because in general, I think it's very well made. It's like a nice, solid thing. It doesn't feel fragile or anything like that. It's totally uninteresting.

But it's fine. Like, I'm not super bothered by it. And everybody puts cases on their phone anyway. I just want everybody to know it took Allison like a full minute just now to find the power button. I took like three photos before I found the power button. Okay, it's on the top. I'm going to take a look at this. Put power buttons back on the top of phones. It's next to a headphone jack. It's got a headphone jack. I love a headphone jack. Yeah. And it has...

optical image stabilization in a camera, which Jeff Bezos spent like five minutes on in the presentation. I was like, I guess it was kind of rare at that point in a smartphone. But my memory of it is that... The stabilization didn't work very well. It probably didn't. And neither did the thing would hunt for focus like crazy. Yeah, because it's still like teeny tiny sensor. Yeah.

Now we've lost Sean. Sean, what are you doing? Tell us about it. It has been many years since I held this thing. Yeah, you're right. I think the cameras are just so off-putting on the front. Like you said, this is well before we were hiding them under the screen using dynamic islands or cutouts or anything like that. And it's all black anyway with big bezels, so there's just no hiding it. You can't surround it with screen.

And yeah, it's just, you know, I've never been a small phone person. I'm not an iPhone Plus person. I go with where they go with the main sizes, and that's usually fine for me. This feels a little tight for me, but I could see the appeal. And, you know, it feels fine. It feels like a lower budget Android phone like we would have reviewed, you know, many times over. Totally. I mean, it is sort of a perfect microcosm of the whole thing for me because it is it is a good.

phone with no ideas. It's true of the design. It's true of the features. It is a nicely made thing for no reason.

And that's Fire Phone. All those things I'm saying are before you open this thing up and start using it. Yeah. Because then you get into this idea of like a sort of weird forked Android and no Play Store. Amazon's version of Android, by the way, hideous.

Yes. I mean, it's just very. Icon choices were bad. It really wanted you to use the Amazon app store, even though there were only like 12 apps in the Amazon app store. Yeah. It just all, all of the stuff it tried to do to Android just did not work. Yeah. It's just not a very. I could see this design sort of working. It's sort of, there were some rumors I remember.

In the run up to this thing about maybe Android was going to buy or Amazon was going to buy WebOS or the rights to it and maybe put some version of WebOS on this. You can see some legacy elements of this and the idea that you have this sort of top nav that you're swiping through. That's like. you know not all that far off from the kind of card system of web os so like

There's something there, maybe, and you could see how they could get there with this if they had refined this software a bit more. And I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about the actual software. Because there's just some weird ideas in this that don't really make any sense and never made sense at the time. And I think for anybody picking this thing up, it was really off-putting. What do you remember as particularly bad in the software?

One of the big things was they made a big idea about these kind of slide-over situations. From the left, you were able to slide over a panel. From the right, you were able to slide over a panel. But the problem with those kinds of things. Drop shadows everywhere. Look at this. They love to drop shadow. It's like unreadable. And like V1 Android icon pack. You know, everything looks very old. But if you move your head, the icons wiggle.

so that counts for something well we should come back to that in a moment but in general like how many times have we seen this all across software where this idea even in like um ipad os is a great example too when you're hiding things off screen

Like you got to have clear communication to people as to like what's going to be there when they go to swipe it, if they even remember that it's there. And how does that interact? Is it interacting within the app specifically or the operating system or whatever? Amazon kind of had it both ways with the two panels that they were working with, but I remember it was never consistent as to when.

it would show you anything. Like I just swiped over now and the one on the right was like, there are no cards to show you. And it's like, okay, so am I just going to play this game every time I open up something new? And so like, even just outside of the main interaction space, all these other ideas.

None of them ever made much sense. And, you know, maybe that's a symptom of them not getting enough runway with this phone to make those ideas sing a little bit. But, I don't know, that idea of hiding things.

Never really makes too much sense for me on the software side. Yeah, I tend to agree. So, okay, so this phone comes out. There's some very fun reviews, including ours. So let me just play you a couple of clips that we have of the reviews of this phone. First, Baby David. We'll see Baby David do a review first.

The first time you look at it or touch it, there's really nothing remarkable about the Fire Phone. The only hint you get from looking at the Fire Phone that it might be something a little bit different is the five, count them, five, camera lenses pointing out at the front bezel. They make for an ugly front of a smartphone, like exposed screws or visible seams. So I haven't changed at all.

That feature is called dynamic perspective. But with everything else, it's just a gimmick, and sometimes it's actually unhelpful. It means that the Fire Phone doesn't always show the time or battery levels. You have to tilt the phone slightly to make them appear. The other big new feature of the Fire Phone is Firefly.

At a very basic level, Firefly has a shopping tool, like the ones available for lots of other devices. You're running out of soap, so you scan the bottle, and four seconds later you've bought more soap. From Amazon. The problem is it doesn't work all that well. Even the home screen is confusing.

It shows every app, book, or item you've opened in reverse chronological order. And since Amazon doesn't have the Play Store, it's missing a huge number of Android apps, including all of Google's. And everything from the email client to the calendar app to Maps suffers as a result.

It's full of big ideas, a couple of them huge and full of potential that will probably never be realized. In a few months or years, things like Dynamic Perspective and Firefly could go from cool gimmicks to actually important features. But in an effort to make something different and new and innovative,

Amazon kind of forgot to make a good smartphone. The Fire Phone tries to be fun and delightful, but too often it's just complicated. What a handsome guy that was. I don't know who he is, but I like him a lot. yeah it's that's basically my memory of the thing that like it was uh it was trying to do so much i just remember i mean listen we went through this we go through this countless times when it comes to

review items that have big gimmicky features, whether that's the folds that come through, anything that gets released that has something really striking. It's like a rush at the office to go see it. Like when you or whoever else would come back in and have it for the first time. And this is one of the first ones that I remember getting that experience with in the office of like.

what's this going to look like? We'd heard for years about this, like 3D, but it's not 3D. And like, how is this going to work? And it was just the lifetime of... how interesting and exciting that feature was, was just like infinitesimal. It was like, oh, that's how it works. Okay. Oh, all right.

Bye. Like, I mean, it was literally that fast. Like I just, there was just never anything that felt that felt useful about it or even interesting enough to really care, especially to care enough to have. five, you know, four dedicated cameras and then leveraging the far facing one, like five cameras facing you all the time. And to like throw away everything you have in whatever operating system you're already using to jump over to this thing like that.

It just makes no sense. Let me play you a couple more reviews while we're sitting here. I just, I want to hammer home the point that everybody thought the same thing. So let's just watch. The Fire Phone is fun and good looking, but with such a strong focus on shopping, it's hard to recommend over competitors like the iPhone 5S. We give it 3.5 stars. The Fire is an average phone with average looks, average performance, and less than average battery life.

Like they have a really ridiculously silly peak feature where you can see extra information about things when you tilt it sideways and like the status bar is not there until you tilt it sideways. I don't get that. The phone makes sense if you spend too much time and money shopping on Amazon or if you comparison shop a lot. But for everyone else, the few unique benefits you get aren't enough to justify moving to AT&T or renewing your contract.

Brutal. Big burn on AT&T. Seriously. As a legacy singular customer who got grandfathered into AT&T, I feel offended. But I do. I think that everybody's sort of grokked the same thing, which is that fundamentally this device exists so that you'll buy more stuff on Amazon, which is just not a good reason to buy a phone. It's a good reason, ironically, to buy lots of things, but not a phone.

Yeah, and especially because the company was building up such an overwhelming ecosystem of other ways to buy stuff. You know, like maybe this product makes more sense if they hadn't done the Echo, or... X, Y, Z. There's a lot of other ways into the Amazon ecosystem. The other thing that's really interesting to me, too, about the time that this comes out is we're really entering the dawn of the streaming age. Amazon's making its own content at this time.

And like, you know, you mentioned the books before. I'm sure that was a pressure on this. But it also seems like, you know, not everybody's going to buy a Fire tablet. So not everybody's going to watch Fire or Prime video stuff on there. You know, people were watching more mobile stuff.

like if there is a version of this that it you know geared more towards that kind of usage that maybe makes a little bit more sense but it it really doesn't come up as much as you would have expected i mean like they talk a big game in the in the the keynote about how oh you know all the things that you love about prime video like the um

I forget what they call it, but the ability to see who's in a scene of a movie. All of that will be here too. But it's almost like an afterthought to a certain extent because the idea of watching full movies and stuff on your phone still wasn't quite there yet. And so they didn't really ever have a chance to position this thing around that. And it just left them in this spot of just sticking to shopping is the main thing. Totally.

Allison, you were not a phone reviewer at the time. So we're going to review this thing right now. What is 2014 Allison giving the fire a phone? Okay. Like score? Should I score it? Yeah, you have to score it. Oh, God. We can't make people angry unless you score it. This has got to be a four, I think. Yeah. I think that's right. It would be lower if it was like, it like does.

Things. It works. It's presumably you could call people on it. You could. I can confirm that. I think so. And I was kind of like reading this. reading the reviews of this with a little bit of morbid curiosity as someone working for the company but not involved in any way. So being like, well, this is a little bit of a train wreck.

But I think the one line that summed it up, and I can't remember which one of you wrote it, was like, I see why this is a good idea for Amazon. I don't see why it's a good idea for me. Sums up the entire Fire Phone existence. It's so true. Yeah. I will say it's so funny. Like I spend a lot of time comparison shopping, which is not something I thought about until we got that review montage. But the idea of like being able to stand in the aisles of a Target.

and just look up the price on Amazon is actually a thing I do all the time. But that's like a super good app idea for Amazon to make. Again, they did it. They released a Firefly app. This phone could have been an app. I think it's still on my phone. Yeah. Like what? That's actually that's a fun. If they had really invested in Firefly tech outside of trying to make a phone. Yeah. They actually could have been way ahead on a lot of things. There's kind of like what if they had.

you know, thought more, not thought more about the software, but kind of like seeing it as a software first kind of phone rather than all the like hardware gimmicks. Yeah. Like they had some very bad ideas about software too, clearly. But I don't know. The thing about the Firefly and object recognition, like we're still chasing this with AI. Every friggin' AI demo is like, and you can tell what...

what this building is and what the history is. Like, we're still on that. So I don't know. They were kind of onto something. Like, what if this was the free phone you got with Prime and it did some cool, useful... stuff in the software but then i come back to like that just ship an app like ship a whole phone like clearly amazon watch famously have fewer cameras yeah battery life great

on an app. Now I kind of wish Amazon had launched like a dedicated digital camera just for this. Like Dashwan style. They're like, we're just going to make a camera.

It's just called Firefly, and you just carry this camera around with you all the time. I'm sure Lab 126 had a camera somewhere on a shelf. So, okay, so the phone comes out. Fun fact, by the way, you mentioned the Echo. Guess what also launched the same year, but for some reason inexplicably was not on the Fire Phone? Alexa. Months later. Months.

It's like never before have I seen two teams that probably should have talked to each other more. Yeah. Like if they had shipped this thing as like the Alexa phone, it might have actually been compelling. Yeah. Especially in contrast to Siri, which at that time had launched, but was already starting to seem limited.

in its capability and to have something like Alexa that was more capable. Although, God, the process, could you imagine how much quicker the battery would die if it had Alexa 2? You're always listening. Your phone just dies every 10 minutes. So the phone comes out. Basically disaster. The only number I've seen is that Amazon sold tens of thousands of them, which is rough. And also, if you're one of those people, I would like to hear from you. It was.

$200 in July with a two-year contract. By September, you could get it for 99 cents with a two-year contract. And by November, the unlocked model was $199. Yeah. Brutal. Yeah. By November. They just instantly were like, never mind, everybody hates this phone, we're getting out. Amazon basically, at first, blamed the price for everything, which I do not think is correct, just to be very clear. And Dave Lim's quote,

He said this to Fortune, I believe, was we didn't get the price right. I think people come to expect a great value and we sort of mismatched expectations. We thought we had it right, but we're also willing to say we missed. And so we corrected. What he's saying is our phone sucks, but he can't say that because Jeff Bezos will fire him. We're about to take a bath. Yeah, the whole premise of this device is screwed up. We didn't get the price right because our phone is bad. Yeah, right.

But what's interesting is, so they go through all this, they end up taking $170 million charge for unsold phones, which sounds like a big number, but whatever. In the scheme of any of these companies, it's not that big a deal. I mean, it was important at the time because this was still in Amazon's. Let's burn money to grow. Like this is not Amazon that's like stable and profitable. They're trying to grow and they're losing an absolute ton of money. And they were.

pairing those losses a little bit by this point so for them to go back in the other direction and all of a sudden like that that charge that they took swung them back towards like almost like half a billion loss in a quarter and it was sort of like oh yeah like you mentioned the stock before like people on wall street and like analysts and investors at the time were like

Maybe we shouldn't invest in Amazon. That's how much of a sort of banana peel slip moment this really was for the company. That's totally true. But then through it all, Bezos keeps being like, no, we're committed. We're in it for the long haul. He said it's going to take many iterations.

And some number of years, but promised he'd get it right, which is like the story he had told about Amazon all along. Right. He was like, we're in this for the long haul. We're going to keep investing in the company, whatever. This is the whole plan. Spoiler alert. There was no Fire Phone 2. So this is like. in a pretty real way, kind of a black eye for Amazon. But then as late as 2019, Dave Limp, our boy, is still saying Amazon is open to the idea of a phone. And so he says this.

at a conference that year. He's asked whether we're going to build a phone. And he says, the answer is the same as to whether we're going to build a personal computer. What we need to do in order to enter into something new is we have to have an idea to differentiate it.

And I read that and I'm like, you learned nothing. That is not what you need. You need a good phone. I mean, I understand where he's coming from to a degree, but you would hope that there was a bigger lesson learned there that would be easily repeated. Right. Five years later. Yeah. Say no to the CEO more often. I mean, Dave Lim's like tried and true, you know. body guy for, for Bezos, right? I mean, he goes and does whatever Jeff needs. And so like, I don't expect much else from him, but yeah.

That job pays very well, but it involves a lot of quotes like that. And so that's the end of the Fire Phone story. I think one legacy thing that I've seen is there are people out there who are like one of the reasons.

One of the things that held Alexa back over the years might be that the Fire Phone didn't succeed, which I find sort of fascinating because they were forever trying desperately to get people to use Alexa because the more people use your product, the more information you get, the better you can make your thing.

Like Google and Apple, by virtue of having these built-in assistants, were able to just get that kind of data going really fast. And Amazon, meanwhile, has just tried every weird thing it possibly could to get Alexa in front of you in a way that...

You don't have to when you have a smartphone. So I've heard from a bunch of people who were like, this is a bigger whiff than just the phone. Yeah. Which I think is sort of fascinating. But ultimately, the phone is a huge whiff and Siri still sucks. So who knows? It's also, there's something about it that feels so dissonant in the sense of like the lack of vision to see how easily accessible Amazon would be in general to most people. Like what, I guess what I'm asking is like.

What's the extra value they get from you using Amazon on an Amazon phone versus on any other phone? Like, that does not seem like a massive opportunity that they needed to corner. And I'd love to know. why they thought that was important enough to try to corner it. Because to me, it's sort of like the distance between me and buying something on Amazon right now is so infinitesimal. Like I could pull out my phone and within a few taps, like.

There's so many times in like technology development where I feel like people aren't given enough credit as users and their ability to just like. type out three words you know like or even less and it's just I don't know that's one of the things that looking back on this feels so strange about it is I guess at the time it felt like it was more imperative for them but

What an odd amount of resources to throw at a problem that was kind of already solved. Yeah, it does feel like the Amazon thing of like we invent the thing, even if it already exists. We want our version of it like.

Amazon Chime, rest its soul. Like I had to use that software there instead of Slack. And it was a... revelation when i left amazon i could use slack and like emoji react to things but it was just like well you guys need to use our thing so because we built it yeah yeah this sort of feels like um almost a vanity thing of like, we just need our thing out there and this is what it's going to be. And then just with phones, people can be like, no.

I don't want your thing. I want to shop on Amazon. It's so important a thing, too, that it's like in almost any other device category, I would have given Amazon a better shot to do a shopping thing. Pick any weird accessory you want to. But to your point, I will say the one piece of credit I will give Amazon is like if you go back to the beginning of this project and you start to see Apple and Google just relentlessly encroaching.

on Amazon's turf like you I'm sure at some point they modeled out like what happens if they stop letting you pay for things in the Amazon app. And that now is like a catastrophe if you're Amazon. So you have to start to be like, okay, we need something we can own so that we're not at the mercy of whatever the rules of these platforms are. That didn't come to pass. Ironically, a lot of other companies were hurt much worse by Apple's policies than Amazon ended up being. But I can see...

I can see why you'd start down this road. Sure. I think that's fair. Then they just did all the wrong things after that. Yeah. One reasonable decision and then 700,000 terrible ones. Yeah. All right. We need to take one more break and then we're going to come back. and do our eight questions. We'll be right back. Oh hey, welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa, Zoe Saldana. Hey, can you wrap these please? Wow, iPhone 17s. You splurged.

At T-Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So... I have to trade in my old phone, right? No, at T-Mobile, there's no trade-ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone, too, for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama.

Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with... Hey, where are you going? To T-Mobile! Thanks, Zoe! The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade in needed when you switch. Plus four lines for just $25 a line. All right, we're back.

So on every episode of Version History, we ask the same eight questions about each product. Somehow this I thought would be the easiest one. It turns out to be the hardest for almost all of these. Question number one, what was the best thing about the Fire Phone? Allison, you go first. Yeah, I guess I'll go with Firefly only because it's like... Damn it. I know. I get to claim that one. Yeah, because we're still kind of trying to figure it out.

Google lens exists and is still used to this day. And I use it to figure out what kind of plant I'm looking at. I don't think it's a spectacular idea, but like there was. there was something useful there i think i bet that was that yours sean yeah i mean because it's the one feature that really actually reached escape velocity and made it to other places even if it wasn't in under amazon's watch

that all the people in attendance at the event got a book. I'm pro-reading. Reading's good. I think that's good. That's a good thing that the Fire Phone did. Yeah, I like it. Okay, I'm going to say something that I... think potentially is wrong, but I'm going to say it anyway. The thing on the home screen where it would scroll endlessly through everything you'd ever done on your phone, I love that.

I mean, again, it's sort of it's got some like WebOS. Just give me the thing where it's like the book I was reading and then the show I was watching and then the website I was looking at. It's like there's full chaos. Yeah. But I also like that actually sort of maps with how I use my phone. I kind of dig it. So that's the multitasking pain? Like, if you're switching between apps, is that the app switcher? Basically, yeah. Or is it just like... But it was like a...

item by item switcher. And they're like, let's make it look weird and part of the home screen. Yeah, pretty much. Okay. All right. A never-ending carousel of... calendar and monkey icons. It's like your browser history, but it tells you nothing. And it's all just unknowable icons. That was the best thing about the Fire Phone, says David Pierce. I was going to say for mine that they didn't buy WebOS and WebOS

got to live a long, fruitful life elsewhere under the stewardship of another tech brand. We're going to come back to that. Hold that thought for a second. Number two, what was the worst thing about the Fire Phone? Sean? Oh, I mean... the optical stuff i mean like again like a fun tech demo ish but like

It doesn't help that we were paying so much attention for so many years to all the rumors and leaks and everything. So even if it was good, it was always going to be hard to live up to the idea of what it could be. the execution of something like the 3ds at the time which was like a no glasses 3d that worked even if it kind of strained your eyes after a bit so like you know to to have it land and have it be so central to some of the other problems of the phone while adding nothing

You know, it's just it's got to be that. Anything to add? I think also Firefly in the way that like it's the you can shop for everything machine. Like all you want to do is walk around and shop. Like, you know, that aspect. Go shop for us. Yeah, right. Buy things on Amazon all the time. Like, I hate that. And it's clearly not a way people want to structure their lives, their phones. So like that aspect of Firefly.

I think it's not great. Yeah, fair enough. I think I'm going with dynamic perspective, too, just because not only is it a useless feature, it murdered the battery. And that is like if there is one thing you cannot do on your phone. It's ship it with bad battery life. And they made a useless feature that made it had bad battery life. And that is inexcusable.

Question number three, would it have been a bigger hit if Apple made it? And in this case, I am not saying a smartphone. I am saying you have to take every single feature of this phone. Oh, my God. But Apple makes it. Is this thing a bigger hit? Oh, man. I mean, at this point, Steve Jobs is dead, right? Yes. So it's Tim Cook having to sell ideas like this. We're in like iPhone 7 territory.

Sorry, rephrase the question again. Would it have been a bigger hit? A bigger hit. Yes. Yeah. Because like by just default. I almost wish it had because I think the like the test of the Apple reality distortion field with dynamic perspective would have been incredible. Yeah. Especially coming off. You're holding it wrong. You know. Yeah. But like can can breathless Johnny Ive. Yeah. me that this is how I want to look at my phone. Using Apple Maps. To be fair, this was the same time...

Apple launched the Apple Watch and tried to convince everybody that the digital crown is a revolutionary input device on par with multi-touch on the mouse. And this would have been part and parcel of that? That would have been a hell of a launch event. Oh my God. But yeah, I think the answer is pretty clearly yes on that one. Question number four. If you could go back and make this thing yourself, what would you do differently? You're Jeff Bezos. You're in charge. What would you do differently?

I mean, let them cook. Let Lab 126 cook. You know, like, get out of there and come back when they've got ideas. I mean, everything that you read about the development of this thing really does sound like... a more intrusive presence from him that slanted the development of the thing and i think there's probably always an element of that inside these big corporations especially with ones with big

you know, sort of outside CEOs who have an influence on, on the operations. But like, I think there, there just had to have been more autonomy to this. Like there probably was for some of the other products that we don't hear about him having gotten himself involved with. So I would say that. Yeah, I think that's a good answer. Awesome. What do you got? I would do the cheap one. Like make the cheap phone. Don't do the silly.

3d stuff uh make it a kindle uh kindle phone yeah that's my answer i don't know full go e-ink i think it should be e-ink oh hell now you're speaking my language that's my stuff right there books palma Well, this just became my favorite phone of all time. No, I was going to say the same thing. Like even just...

In that room where you're like, do we want to ship the fancy one or do we want to ship the cheap one? Just pick the cheap one. Just ship the cheap one. Earn the right to go do the weird stuff. test this theory that what a lot of people want to do is use their phone to buy stuff on Amazon and then go build crazy stuff for them to buy stuff on Amazon. Even you just saying Kindle phone sounds so much more approachable. And I know that at the time that they had.

fire stick fire tv like they were going down this road like i don't know maybe it just was maybe that would have helped a little bit i wouldn't have changed the product prime phone would have been better Kindle phone would have been better. Amazon phone would have been better. They almost got it the worst they could have done. Other than like the AWS phone, that would have been worse. Yeah. But short of that.

So many options. Kindle phone is clearly the right answer, though. That's very good. I liked that a lot. Question number five. What feature of this thing should every current version have? What would we take from the Fire Phone and put onto every modern smartphone?

Allison? Headphone jack. Oh, yeah. Good answer. Cop-out answer. The only right answer. I'm good at that. A physical home button. I did kind of miss that. It's one of the things that I was playing with that I was like, you know what? I do kind of miss this as much as I like the bezel-less look. There's something about that that I miss. You know what? On the home button, I think the home button on here is extra.

special and appealing because I get lost using this phone so much. I was like, what am I doing? I'm looking at cards. touching a 3d monkey like i need to need to push the home button so yeah i don't know this is a bit of a break from that but we because we talked about it before but we didn't really come back to it but is there any value in the mayday stuff that they did

Because it was such an interesting idea of making that more available to people. And in the keynote address, you know, they're showing people, maybe they're actors or it's hard to say, but, you know. it was still a time that a lot of people were figuring out how to use their smartphones like how do i turn on bluetooth you know that kind of stuff so i think it had more value back then but is there any world now where you see a feature like that being valuable

setting aside the fact that, like, could they scale it up to more than just 10 users? I kind of think, I mean, in an interesting way, if you sort of squint at what Mayday was, that's what agentic AI is trying to do right now. Yeah, exactly.

This whole sort of Siri that can use all your apps for you thing is like so much of that is somebody just being like, I need to figure out how to, I don't know, buy concert tickets. And it's like, oh, I can help you do that on your phone. Having a person do that. Is it like over VPN? Weird. But I think that idea actually of like people need help navigating their phones. Like it's a thing that I forget that I'm constantly reminded of every time you see those like.

10 iPhone tricks you didn't know about videos. You know what I'm talking about? And like, I don't know what y'all's experience is like, but I go through those and I'm like, I knew all 10 of these. This is like very basic stuff. And then just like.

cascades of comments being like, oh, my God, I had no idea you could do that. This is so awesome. It's like, right, phones are stupid and complicated. And actually, most people don't sit around just clicking every button they can find for three hours in order to see how their phone works. And so something like. that that is like, I'm going to actually sort of sit here and help you answer these questions makes a lot of sense. And frankly, I'd rather it be a person than an AI bot.

But it doesn't feel like that's where we're headed. Yeah. The new the Galaxy S25, the Samsung phones, one of their new AI things is like natural language search in the settings menu, which I think is so smart. And you just search for things like.

make screen less bright or, you know, something like that. And it'll get you to the display settings. You have to search like a caveman. Yes. Screen, no bright. You have to do that. Where are you hiding Bixby? Where did he go? Bixby, where are you? Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's kind of an undersung, like, that's a really good use for AI. Like, more of that. Yeah. Let's do that. Yeah, I like that. Question number six. Is there an alternate timeline in which this thing was more or even more successful?

I don't think so, personally. I think put this at any point in the run of smartphone history, and this thing is a disaster. Yeah, in its form, no. But this is where I want to come back to the webOS thing. Fire Phone plus webOS equals victory? Oh, man. I mean, how much of The Verge's DNA is tied up into tortured thoughts about WebOS? I mean...

I think it could have helped because, again, like the build of this thing was fine. And if the software experience was just that much more approachable, I think there's maybe there could have been a future for it. I don't know. I think it would have been more successful, but not like phenomenally more. Yeah. What do you think? Yeah, I don't think so. And it is just the, it just comes back to like, who is this for thing?

phone to appease Jeff Bezos, who is like lurking around Lab 126 every day, like trying to decide how the button should look or whatever. It just doesn't feel like a phone that, you know, answers a need. for people who exist in the world. Yeah, I think my guess is one of the reasons Amazon never made a second one of these is that this whole saga taught them that people don't actually want an Amazon phone. Yeah. Like, I would buy a good phone if Amazon happened to make it.

But the idea of like it again, it goes back to the Nike thing like there are brands people will buy things from because they are from those brands. And Amazon was not and I think is not one of those brands. Yeah. And. Much though they'd like to be, that turns out that's not a thing you can just do. Question number seven. I suspect we also know the answer to this. Could you reboot this product now and have it work?

This is actually sort of fun because what you get for free here is 11 years of all of this technology theoretically getting better. So you have the same number of ideas, but 11 more years of technological development. Does this thing become more compelling?

I mean, what could it do? Like the 3D jumps off the screen at you? Is it even more dynamic? I feel like this is the final version of this thing, you know? That's the most damning critique possible of dynamic perspective. It's like faces, hand reaching out. Yeah, right. Like, the monkey in the game touches you. Like, no, I don't think so. It'll pull the toilet paper off the shelf into your cart for you. Yeah, if it can go shopping for me and I don't have to ever push a button.

or think about what I'm making for dinner. No, I'm like, I don't know. Don't think so. Yeah, if some of the tech had advanced and that price stays the same, like if you're talking about this as like a mid to low range thing built on a better version of your contract. And then, yeah, sure, there's a version of this where it succeeds, maybe even bundled with the carrier. I think more people are doing that kind of these days now, right?

So, you know, as an actual budget option that just happens to be really tied to the Amazon ecosystem, I think there's a version of that that makes some sense now. How much sense? I don't know. Now. I don't buy it. It definitely needs a rev on the industrial design at the very least. I'll give you that. Yeah, I just, I don't see it. Like, I don't look at any of this and think this is worth trying again.

Yeah, I mean, 40,000 feet. Like, it's so hard to penetrate the phone market, like, at all. Oh, sure. Especially in the U.S. Like, so no, but like. Well, I guess, I mean, the other sort of Amazon-specific version of this is, like, if you got this free for being a Prime member. Would you use it? It would just sit in a drawer. It's e-waste at that point. It's a kid phone, I think, at best.

Because it's not like I'm getting it and I haven't already got a smartphone. I'm more likely to pull out the Nextbit Robin I have in a drawer somewhere. At least that's fun. RIP Nextbit.

There's a version history episode. Oh my gosh. All right. And then question number eight. Our final question. Does the Fire Phone belong in the version history hall of fame? Like all halls of fame. The Virgin History Hall of Fame is nebulous and complicated and mostly vibes-based. But the rubric for us with this is basically like, was this thing... capital I important? Like in the long sweep of the history of the tech industry, does this thing matter?

Sean laughs. I have Sean's answer. My answer. I think it's a cautionary tale. Like there has to be a frame around it. It's like, don't do this thing. It's like the hall of cautionary. It's like a wing. It's a wing. That's like if you're the CEO of a tech company, you need to go down there and like look at all of the things that are like a monastery. Yes. You go think about what you've done.

Think about what you've done, Jeff Bezos. It's just like this is what happens when you get some wins under your belt and you start being told you're the most smartest. famous best businessman of all time and you make billions of dollars or whatever. And then if you just start believing your own, you know, legend, I think you end up at the.

Fire phone. So this is Ben Affleck making Gigli, but of phones. Yes. Is that what you're saying? In the Hall of Shame wing, it'll be Gigli in the fire phone. Okay. Yeah. All right. Unfortunately, the Virgin History Hall of Fame does not yet have this wing. It remains. I think it's in the plans. OK, good. But I think for now, I think we can't.

I think in good conscience, we cannot put this thing in the version. There we go. Maybe Amazon, Amazon Fire Phone could sponsor the wing. They can sponsor construction of the wing. The Fire Phone Memorial. Shame. And also, just to point out, I think Gigli Phone would probably still be a better name than Fire Phone. Gigli Phone, I kind of like. Yeah. The Affleck Phone, I'd buy that. A lot of good ideas. All right. We're done here. That is it for the show.

Thank you both for being here. This was very fun. Of course. I don't know what we're going to do with this Fire Phone now, but I don't want it. Smudge it accidentally. Nobody touch it or else it'll be horrible. As always, you can watch all of our episodes on YouTube. You can listen to them wherever you get podcasts. And the best way to support everything that we're doing is to subscribe to The Verge. Thank you so much for being here with us. See you next time.

Version History is produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Eric Gomez, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin. Studio support from Chris Shurtleff. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. Be sure to subscribe to the new Version History podcast feed to get all of our new episodes as soon as they arrive.

Whoa, Zoe Saldana. Hey, can you wrap these, please? Wow, iPhone 17s. You splurged. At T-Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So...

I have to trade in my old phone, right? No, at T-Mobile, there's no trade-ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone, too, for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with... Hey, where are you going? To T-Mobile! Thanks, Zoe!

The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Get four iPhone 17s on us. No trading needed when you switch. Plus four lines for just $25 a line. With 24-month legal credits and four eligible port-ins on essentials for well-qualified customers, auto pay plus taxes, fees, and $35 device connection chart credits and imbalance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel. Contact us. Finance agreement. 256 gigabytes. $830 required. Visit T-Mobile.com.