I was initially reluctant to proffer any sort of an opinion on the suggestion that Amazon might be weighing up a return to the smartphone market.
As far as I recall (we’re talking twelve years ago here), I never spent any meaningful hands-on time with the original Amazon Fire Phone. Not many people did, hence the project’s cancellation after just a year on the market.
What’s more, it was probably around then that I last spent any significant time with an Amazon Fire tablet – the modern versions of which are surely the best reference point for a potential Amazon smartphone (re)launch.
I’m not even an Alexa guy. I occasionally swear at a creaky old Google Nest Hub 2 for failing to hear my kitchen timer requests, and that’s about it.
Tech Advisor
Say it loud, say it clear
Despite all this, I had a surprisingly strong reaction to a recent Financial Times interview with Panos Panay, in which Amazon’s Head of Devices and Services refused to completely stamp out rumours of a new Amazon phone.
Panay responded to a question about a potential Amazon phone with a rather laborious, “it’s not necessarily [that] we’re going after a phone, no”.
“If I black and white say no, I would say that was accurate,” he further prevaricated. “But I also think it’s misleading.”
Which I read to mean: Almost certainly not, but maybe.
Even the hint of a possibility of an Amazon Fire Phone 2, however, was enough to provoke an instinctual wince response in me.
Ben Patterson/Foundry
The service here stinks
One Amazon service I do use on the regular (besides the inescapable shopping service itself) is Prime Video, and it’s enough to make me promise myself I’ll never again use an Amazon-branded piece of hardware.
At a time when I’d argue that virtually all streaming services are blighted by some form of enshittification (maybe Apple TV+ gets a pass), Amazon Prime Video is comfortably the worst of the bunch.
If I were in a charitable mood (which I’m not), I’d omit the fact that Prime Video is comfortably the least stable service that I use directly on my LG CX television, with the acceptance that this could be an issue with the LG app or even my now-pretty-old TV set. But yeah. It hangs and crashes out a lot.
What has me recoiling at the very hint of an Amazon phone, however, is Prime Video’s excessive use of ads. I pay a fairly hefty Amazon Prime subscription fee, as many do, yet movies and TV shows are regularly interrupted by interminable ads – complete with obnoxious links to product purchases on Amazon, of course.
Yes, you can pay to remove these ads. But I subscribe to the old-fashioned idea that adverts should be a replacement for a subscription fee, not a supplement to them.
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
A terrifying vision
Factor in the modern-day experience of using the Amazon website itself, with its cluttered UI and its inaccurate search results that prioritise paying third-party sellers over the actual best listings, and I can’t help but construct a negative vision of a modern Amazon phone.
It’s a vision of a heavily subsidised yet still somehow cheap-feeling handset, pushed into millions of pairs of hands through a deceptively affordable retail price. It’s a phone with a headache-inducing UI that prioritises upselling over fluidity or stability, clawing back that subsidised upfront cost (and then some) through a steady drip of maddening ads.
Perhaps I’m being unfair here, given Amazon and (former Microsoft executive) Panos Panay’s extensive experience in the hardware business. Launching a bad product into a mature smartphone market would be a stupid idea, and say what you like about Amazon, it’s not run by stupid people.
But given the company’s general direction of travel in recent years, I seriously hope that Panay’s mealy-mouthed no actually means no on the Amazon smartphone question.
