The Vergecast - Version History: Fire Phone

Episode Date: November 9, 2025

In 2014, the tech world was abuzz with the prospect of a phone made by Amazon. When the Fire Phone arrived, it was chock full of ideas — a "dynamic perspective" feature that created 3D illusions, an image-recognition feature called "Firefly," and many, many opportunities to buy Amazon products. Allison Johnson and Sean O’Kane join David Pierce to discuss why, unlike Amazon's successful e-readers, this device was a gigantic flop. If you like the show, ⁠⁠subscribe to the Version History feed⁠⁠ to make sure you get every new episode. Subscribe to The Verge⁠ for unlimited access to ⁠theverge.com⁠, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ⁠ad-free podcast feed⁠. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to ⁠[e-mail]⁠ or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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's something. It's called the Firephone. 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.

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in.

Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in.

Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. All right, we're back. It's Firephone time. The greatest phone in the... I'm just kidding. It's the fire phone.

Alison Johnson is here with me. Hi, Allison. Hello. Sean O'Kane, also here. Hi, Sean. We are an interesting group to talk about the firephone. And I'm very excited about this because you and I worked on a bunch of firephone 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 a DP review, which is like Amazon's here. D.P. 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 from that time? 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, you know. 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 motomods. 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. Yeah. I think it's just like such a weird blip in the history of phones that 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 like when it came out and we were covering it, it was like it was a big deal. There was a ton of buildup. We spent a long time covering it.

We have like eight different videos of it that we made over time. And then like you're saying, just instantly gone. Just 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 exists. And goodbye. So I just want to 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 firefoot. I do think it matters. And 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 tax reform or something. He's going to train you on security at HR. Or like a, yeah, An internal HR sort of yearly thing that you have to watch. That's what that vibe was.

Yeah. But so this was 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 skunk works 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.

There's a few times Lab 126 comes in the news. But evidently when Bezos set it up, the plan was to make lots of hardware. They were like, they did the Kindle. 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? And that was the name. Lab 126 was 1 to 26 in the alphabet. Which is like, let's scatter shot in every direction.

But there's a certain set of those that actually like makes 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, okay, you could do an iPod thing if you're Amazon. Yeah. 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, 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'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. And so that's where I use it. I don't trust that. But 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 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 lunches 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, metal chamfered edges and all that. And the fire tablets always felt a bit more approachable, something you could hand to a kid. And they were cheap.

They were, and they were cheap. It was like crucial. They weren't good ever. I remember being really annoyed at the same. 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.

And, like, 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 just is like, leave us alone. We're just going to be over here. I'm surprised they didn't launch your own carrier. Like we are announcing like, you know, cell networks, towers, everything. That's a fun alternate history. I know. It is. Well, and 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. Oh, imagine. What he would have taken from. Oh, no. Truly, truly the dream. But so right around this time, It's 2010. The Kindle fire comes out. Like you said, the iPhone and Android are really taking off.

The iPad is out. The Kindlefire 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 20s. 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% 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 what I understand, this is still in a lot of ways about. books and they're like if 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 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 is maybe not great. 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, especially at a place, you know, I don't know a lot about Lab 1.26, 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, it's 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, 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 were 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. Like people would like cheap things that they don't pay much money for. It 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? Yeah.

Also, he's on a run at this time. Yeah, exactly. I think it's important to keep that in mind. Like, he not only built. 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 hits. 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 a phone. And he was out. 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. From what I understand, Jeff Bezos's 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 were 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. Yeah. 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 HCC1 is great. And I'm like, was that, was that hard to quit? I don't know.

I think it was, we were starting to get, you know, 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 firephone eventually flopped.

Like, there was just such a, you mentioned the modemods 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, okay.

So all of that is going on. 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 some truly wild stuff going on. The first one was called Dynamic Perspective. This was, at least in Jeff Bezos's mind, this was the feature of the phone.

Like, 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 decision. display as you moved her head around. So it was a 3D effect.

And Allison is fully distracted by doing it right now. It's just mesmerizing. I've stopped listening. But like, look at this. And again, like legitimately, it works. It's pretty cool. Well, how do you define works in your day? Well, 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. Yeah, sure. You got stuff going on. It's like you're looking into the phone. I mean, again, in a vacuum, it's, seems like a weird thing to impress on this coterie of designers in Lab 126.

Sure. But, you know, the 3DS was out, 3D movies were happening, you know. That is 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. This is the future of everything. Because people have to act better because they look like they're right in front of me. So, like, 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. Okay. 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's.

Okay. But 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 so much of the reporting, like you said, 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 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, 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 linking in it. now. The thing where you can just, like, move your head and the home screen appears to move, like, that's cool. What about iPhone for that? No, but it's cool. But I do remember, I think it was in the Maps app that 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 for you? You.

you're like trying to get one street name. And there's no amount of pinching and zooming that. Like, it's it, I'm imagining that, but like tilting your head with a phone. Like, that sounds like the most frustrating experience. Yeah, you just hold the phone here and you're like, is that Russell Road? Yeah. Yeah. You're like, how far over trying you 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. Oh, my gosh. How much time do you have? And it's only ever the road you're looking for. Yeah. It's like here. Would you like every surrounding road available to you? Yeah, 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. Does you remember this? Sure. This was the like always. on customer service line. Yeah, which they had done with their Kindles, I think. Like, they had some ground

that they were, maybe they spun it out of Lab 26 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, five people by your phone,

then that's doable. Also, it's a really good idea to start from the jump saying, We need always on support stack for our phone that no one understands. Yeah, you're like, hi, we made this thing. Customer service is great. Like our returns, you're going to love them. You're going to freak out about how easy it is to return your phone.

Like, who, why? Red flags everywhere. Yeah. 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 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 the 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 was like, why did this thing ship me toilet paper? Yeah. But the,

um, 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 Firephone 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 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 is like, 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 going to 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. Oh, my gosh.

And so it's like 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 bleak. But not this phone. 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. Yeah.

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, like, identify objects around you. And everybody's using it now for, like, search or for, you know, remembering where you left for 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. Ryan. You did it. Mission accomplished. And there's a bunch of that in the firephone, too, that it. 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. But yeah, so Firefly, I think was like the closest thing they had to a good idea. But again, we've made 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 enough 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 control, the, like, you know, haptic thing or whatever. 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 it 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 in a way that it isn't. Important to distinguish that from like beloved or like relied upon. 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. 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? It does these deeply unsexy things. Like relentlessly iterate on shipping logistics. Like, holy God, no one cares. But the idea that, like, 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. 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. Like that was 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. Pines' Purple House. Do you guys know anything about this book? No. 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 Sammy 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. And the moral of that story is something. No. But so that's, everybody gets a note from Bezos, basically, inviting to this event. And an invite comes with a book, which I don't think has ever happened to me before or since. Wow. Apple didn't do the Vision Pro? They didn't send you a ready player one.

See that? 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. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too.

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That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. All right. We're back. So, 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. Okay. 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.

Okay. 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 a better phone for our most engaged customers? Can we build a better phone? He starts with a picture of this book. For Amazon crime members. Well, I'm excited to tell you that the answer is yes See look we're like not quite at ripped 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 Yeah right 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 that we're so glad to bring into market.

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. That's what it is. And it's long.

It's like an hour and a half event. Yeah. There's such a preamble too. before he like goes through a whole history of like how good Amazon is, how many people shop with crime. His mom is in attendance. I mean, I know it's in Seattle, but like he brought us. He's like, hey, mom, this one I really did it. We really went and got it.

Your boy, Jeff, he 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.

Also, maybe this wasn't at the time yet, but they made a Firefly app. You could go do this on other phones. Yeah. 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 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. Yeah, anyway. That's 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 like 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, 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, like, whoever made it, like, 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 firephone, 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 that 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. Yeah.

I think that's what most people do. Yeah. 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 bad happening. And it's like that works. And so the idea that, like,

like, I'm so hung up on this thing where inside of Amazon there was also a cheap phone. Yeah. And I'm like, if there had been an Amazon phone that had been like zero dollars 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. That was one of the things they considered to your point, like, and even almost like an inverse of what it wound up happening, which was that there was the idea at one moment that they would ship, 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.

Am I crazy or does that pitch make way more sense? No, and it sounds more Amazonian. Like the thing of like you just end up with an echo because they're on sale for $0 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. But it would have been a shorter presentation though. It would have had so much space to delve into the 600 years of perspective and horizons and in artwork. Yeah, this was, I think, like, peak everybody trying to do Apple.

launches to... Oh, clearly. All right, so, Alison, 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're ready for this? I'm ready for it. The fire phone had a 4.7 inch 720 by 1280 screen.

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 didn't miss my... It's very small. 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 2 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 2 megapixel camera now. Like those little macro cameras are 5 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 2,400 million-hour battery. Oh, so tiny. With all those cameras? Yeah. So this was apparently the biggest problem with dynamic perspective.

It's 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 was. It's great for battery to do that. So this thing comes out. It was 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 I fix it doesn't use the phone, they just rip it apart. Yes. And in terms of what happens when you open it up, they were impressed. That's fine, yeah. Listen, it looks like a phone that you can repair.

It does. It is built that way. There is no Johnny, 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 smut. Like, every breathe on this thing the wrong way. I'm 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. 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. 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.

Like, 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, 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 Alice in 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 want to take a look at this. put power buttons back on the top of funds. It's next to a headphone jack. It's got a headphone jack. Yeah. And it has optical image stabilization in the 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.

Yeah. Now we've lost Sean. Sean, what do you do? 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. There's no, you can't surround it with screen. And yeah, it's just, you know, I've never been a, like, small phone person. I'm not an iPhone plus person. I'm like, 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 with the whole thing for me, because it is a good phone with no ideas. Yeah. That is like, it's true of the design. It's true of the features. Like, it's just, it has.

It is a nicely made thing for no reason. Yeah. 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, you know, Play Store. Amazon's version of Android, by the way, hideous. Yes.

I mean, it's just very... The 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. Oh, no. Yeah. It just all of the stuff it tried to do. 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 WebOS. 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 some weird, there's just some weird ideas in this that don't really make any sense and never made sense at the time. And we're, you know, I think for anybody picking this thing up, it was really off-putting. What do you remember is particularly bad in the software? One of the big things was they made a big idea about these kind of slide over situations. You know, 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... Just drop shadows everywhere. Look at this.

They love to drop shadow. It's like... And like V1 Android icon pack. You know, like everything looks very old. But if you move your head, the icons wiggle. So that comes 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 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? and 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 like 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 run. way with this phone to make those ideas sing a little bit, but I don't know, that never, that idea of hiding things never really makes too much sense for me on 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 firephone. 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 of the front bezel. They make for an ugly front of a smartphone like exposed screws or visible seams. So I haven't changed it all. So I haven't changed the whole. 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 firephone doesn't always show the time or battery level. you have to tilt the phone slightly to make them appear. The other big new feature of the firephone is Firefly. At a very basic level, Firefly is 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 Googles, and everything from the email client to the calendar app, 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 Firephone 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, that's basically my memory of the thing. That, like, it was, it was trying to do so much. I just remember, I mean, listen, we went through this. We would go through this countless times when it comes to review items that have big gimmicky features, whether that's the folds that come through, you know, 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? 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 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 uh 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 front 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 the competitors like the iPhone 5S. We give it three and a half 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 or seriously.

As a legacy singular customer who got grandfathered into AT&T, I feel offended. But I do. I think everybody's sort of groked the same thing, which is that fundamentally this device exists so that you'll buy more stuff on Amazon. Yeah. 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.

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. You know, like there was a lot of other ways into the Amazon ecosystem. The other thing that's really interesting to me, too, about this time that this comes out, is 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, 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 really doesn't come up. as much as you would have expected. I mean, like, they'd 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, I forget what they call it, but, you know, the ability to see who's in a scene of a movie, like, all of that. Yeah, all of that will be here, too. And, like, but it's almost like an afterthought to a certain extent because, like, the idea of, like, 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 shut. 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. Okay. What is 2014 Allison giving the fire phone? I, 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. Yeah. That's right.

It would be lower if it was like, it like does things. It works. It doesn't work. It's presumably you can 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. Totally. It's like sums up the entire Firephone 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 me. Again, they did it. They released a Firefox app. This phone could have been an app. I had. 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. 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 seen 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. fly and object recognition. Like, we're still chasing this with AI. Every friggin' AI demo is like, and you can tell 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, just ship an app. Like to ship a whole phone. Like clearly Amazon wants the control. Apps famously have fewer cameras. Right. 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 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 XEGELF. go. Guess what also launched the same year, but for some reason, inexplicably, was not on the firephone. Alexa. Months later. Months. How it's, 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 like at that time had launched, but was already starting to seem limited in its capability. and to have something like Alexa

was more capable. Although, God, the process, could you imagine how much quicker the battery would die if it had Alexa, too? Always listening. Your phone just dies

every 10 minutes. So the phone comes out basically a 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.

By November, they just instantly were like, never mind, everybody hits 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 Limps 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 is firing. 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 like not that big a deal. I mean, it was important at the time because this one. 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, ooh. 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.

Like 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 long haul. We're going to keep investing in the company, whatever.

This is the whole plan. spoiler alert there was no Firephone too so this is like in a pretty real way kind of a black eye for Amazon but then his latest 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 just, 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 repeatable in an interview five years later. Yeah. Yeah. Say no to the CEO more often. I mean, Dave Limps like tried and true, you know, body guy for Bezos, right? Yeah, he goes and does whatever Jeff needs.

And so, like, I don't expect much else from him, but... No. 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 firephone 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.

And like Google and Apple, by virtue of having these built-in assistants, we're 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 are 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 are 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. 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 for them. 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 we built it. Yeah. This sort of feels like 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. Like 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. Like, 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, 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. your 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 like I can see, I can see why you'd start down this road. Sure. I just, 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. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all, all by yourself, are over. There's no romance in burning out while you're trying to scale. Instead, you can check out Upwork. Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialize talent across more than 125 categories. So you can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale without committing to full-time headcount.

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That's upw-w-R-K-com. Upwork.com 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? Alison, 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 plan I'm looking at. I don't think it's a spectacular idea. But, like, 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 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 Firephone 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 got some webOS vibes. 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. And I kind of, 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.

But it was 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. Yeah, it's like your browser history, but it tells you nothing.

Yeah. And it's all just unknowable icons. Yeah. 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 lives elsewhere under the stewardship of another tech brand. But 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, fun tech demo-ish, but like, you know, 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 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

Oh 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 to 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.

Yeah, 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 if Apple would have been a bigger hit? Yes. Yeah. Because 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, yeah. But like, can breathless Johnny I've convinced me that this is how I want to look at my phone? Yeah. Using Apple Maps. Yeah.

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 part with the multi-touch on the mouse. And this would have been part and parcel with that? That would have been a hell of a launch of that. 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. corporations, especially with ones with big, you know, sort of outsized CEOs who have an influence 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. That was my. Don't do the silly 3D stuff. Yep. Make it a Kindle.

Kindle phone. Yeah, that's my answer. Like, 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 Palmer.

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. like 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.

Yeah. That's what I mean. 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

but short of that it's so many options Kindle phone is clearly the right answer though Kindle phone that's very good I like 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 on to every modern smartphone Allison Headphone Jack Yeah Good answer Cop out answer

The only right answer I'm good at it A physical home button. I did kind of miss that. 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 bezzles 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, like, special and appealing because I get lost using this phone so much.

I was like, what am I doing? I'm looking at cards. I'm touching a 3D monkey. Like, I need to push the home button. So, I don't know. This is a bit of a break from that. But 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 their 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, it's like, that's what agentic AI is trying to do right now. It's like, 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 saying 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. And it's like, right, phones are stupid.

And it's a way too 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 bought. 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, it makes screen less bright or, you know, something like that. And it'll get you to the display settings. Do you have to search like a caveman? Yes. Screen, no brights.

You have to do that. Where are you hiding Vixby? Where did he go? Vixby, 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. Yeah, oh, okay. Firephone plus WebOS equals victory? Oh, man. I mean, how much of the Virgin's DNA has 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. But 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?

the phone to appease Jeff Bezos, who is, like, lurking around Lab 126 every day, like, trying to decide how the bunch 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, it 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? 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 his 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 part 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, and 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 is 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. Like, I think more people are doing that kind of these days now, right? Like, 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. No. 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, like, 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? I would just sit in a drawer. It's e-waste at that point. Yeah. 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. Yeah, right. More likely to pull out like the next bit Robin I have in a drawer somewhere.

At least that's fun. RIP next bit. There's a version history episode. Oh, my God. 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,

version history Hall of Fame is nebulous and complicated and mostly vibes based. But the sort of 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 laughed, so I have Sean's answer. My answer, I think it's a cautionary tale. Like, there has to be a frame around it as like, don't do this thing, you know?

It's like when. The hall of cautionary tale. Yeah. It's like a wing. It'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. Just a monastery? Yes. You go think about what you've done.

Think about what you've done, Jeff B. I was, 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, the 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 Gile, but of phones. Yes. Is that what you're saying? It'll in the hall of shame way. It'll be Jeeley 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 should.

It's in the plans. Okay, good. But I think for now, I think we can't, I think in good conscience, we cannot put this thing in the version of the Hall of Fame. There we go.

It is decided. Maybe Amazon, the iPhone could sponsor the wing. They can sponsor construction of the wing. The Firephone Memorial. Exactly. And also, just to point out,

I think Gilephone would probably still be a better name than Firephone. Oh, my gosh. Glephone, I kind of like. Yeah. The House-Lick phone, I'd buy that. Yeah. A lot of good ideas. All right, we're done here.

That is it for the show. Thank you both for being here. This is 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, actually going to be horrible. 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 Shirtleff. 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.