Who does Amazon hate? Who does the company really want to destroy?
Amazon is a store. It is not an electronics maker like Apple or a wireless carrier like AT&T. It started out with books, killing brick-and-mortar bookstores pretty much dead. The Kindle, its first move into hardware, was part of that strategy. Then it decided to sell digital media and apps with the help of the Kindle Fire.
The Amazon Fire Phone exists so Amazon can showroom the world. It's the hardware device for the Everything Store. And any actual store that competes with Amazon should be just a little afraid (but only a little for now, as I'll explain below.)
Showrooming, in case you haven't heard of it, is the practice of going to brick-and-mortar stores to check things out and then buying them more cheaply online. It's the bane of companies like Best Buy, which sell big-ticket electronics to an online-savvy market.
The Fire Phone lets you showroom everything. That's the purpose of its Firefly button. Firefly will undoubtably also become an app on Android and iOS phones, but we've seen apps like this before; the showrooming impulse seems to dissipate as you summon the various clicks and scans to get RedLaser or Google Goggles up and running.
With a single click from the lock screen, Amazon's trying to make showrooming much easier. Pair that with the company's experiments in same-day delivery - another reason why people sometimes don't shop online - and you have a device that threatens every brick-and-mortar retail store in America.
That's who Amazon wants to destroy: Wal-Mart. Walgreens. Target. Radio Shack. Every little mom-and-pop still selling hard goods in America. Apple, Samsung, and AT&T can be Amazon's suppliers, even though Apple and AT&T have successful retail arms. But pure retail stores are just the enemy.
You Still Have To Buy The Phone
Of course, to showroom the world, you still have to buy the phone. And the Fire Phone seems more confusing than compelling.It's a phone with the specs of the Moto X , Samsung Galaxy S4, or last year's HTC One, sold at the price of this year's hot new model. It's an AT&T exclusive with no price breaks, sponsored data, or other tricks to show why. That makes the AT&T exclusive look like it comes from a Nokia-like position of weakness rather than an Apple-like position of strength.
The phone's 3D-like "dynamic perspective" looks destined to join other gimmicky interfaces like Samsung's Air Gesture and LG's Thrill 3D UI as a trivia answer rather than a world-changer. While I haven't used the phone yet, it isn't getting great marks for ease of use from early hands ons.
Amazon is smart, so I can only assume that this phone is a beta-test for several of the company's technologies. Maybe Amazon doesn't care about selling millions upon millions of these - rather, it wants to see how a million or so people behave with a magic showrooming device put in their hands.
It'll collect massive amounts of data from these customers. It'll know not only what they're scanning and what they're buying, but (thanks to geolocation) where they're buying it. Amazon will be able to figure out who's standing in a Walgreens shopping on Amazon, and who's standing in a Radio Shack.
Then it will take that data home, refine it, and push it out to the next generation of Amazon shopping apps and hardware. Will the company decide it needs a best-selling phone, or maybe just a partnership with Samsung in the end? The Fire Phone is a step towards figuring that out.
For more, check out The Amazon Fire Phone Event's Biggest Surprise, as well as our Hands On With the Amazon Fire Phone, and our analysts' first take in the video below.