The Amazon Fire Phone: The $650 Shopping Cart That Could Also Make Calls
How Jeff Bezos spent four years building a phone whose killer feature was making it easier to give Jeff Bezos money
In July 2014, Jeff Bezos — a man who had successfully sold books, then everything else, then cloud computing, then a newspaper — walked onstage and revealed that Amazon had spent four years and an undisclosed fortune building a smartphone. The phone cost $650. It was locked to AT&T. It didn't have Google Maps.
And its signature feature was a dedicated hardware button that let you point your camera at any object in the physical world and immediately buy it on Amazon.
Let me restate that, because the sheer corporate audacity deserves to be admired at close range: Amazon built a telephone whose primary innovation was a button that helps you shop at Amazon. They called this button "Firefly." They put it on the side of the phone where your thumb naturally rests. They priced this device identically to the iPhone 6. And then they were confused when nobody bought it.
Within two months, the price dropped from $199 on contract to ninety-nine cents. Not ninety-nine dollars. Ninety-nine cents. The same phone that launched at the same price as the best-selling iPhone in history was, eight weeks later, worth less than a pack of gum at the AT&T counter.
Amazon took a $170 million write-down and had $83 million in unsold inventory. The phone was discontinued after thirteen months on the market, which, in hindsight, was twelve months longer than it deserved.
The Vision: Your Pocket Should Be a Showroom
The Fire Phone had four development years and the full force of Jeff Bezos's obsessive attention behind it. This was not a half-hearted experiment. Bezos was personally involved in the feature set, the hardware design, and the experience. He wanted whiz-bang features: contactless payments, mid-air hand gestures, force-sensitive grip detection. He wanted the phone to feel like the future.
What he got was Dynamic Perspective — a "3D effect" powered by four front-facing infrared cameras that tracked your head position and adjusted the display accordingly. In practice, this meant your lock screen wallpaper wiggled when you tilted the phone, which was exactly as useful as it sounds.
Reviewers described it as a "gimmick with no practical value." It drained the battery. It added weight and cost. It existed because Jeff Bezos thought it was cool, and nobody at Amazon had the career death wish required to tell him otherwise.
Then there was Firefly, the phone's real purpose for existing. Point your camera at a book, a DVD, a cereal box, a wine label, a piece of furniture — and Firefly would identify it and show you where to buy it on Amazon.
The dedicated hardware button on the side of the phone meant you were never more than one click away from giving Amazon your money. This is the smartphone equivalent of inviting someone into your home and discovering they've rearranged your furniture to face a cash register.
Oh, and it ran Fire OS — Amazon's fork of Android that didn't include Google Play Store. No Google Maps. No Gmail. No YouTube. The Amazon Appstore had roughly one-quarter of the apps available on Google Play. Amazon assumed developers would rush to build for their platform. The developers did not rush. The developers stayed exactly where they were, building for the two billion people using actual Android and iOS.
The Glorious User Experience
Kevin from Dallas, TX — ★★☆☆☆
"I bought it because I'm a Prime member and figured the integration would be seamless. It was. Seamlessly, everything I did on this phone led me to a purchase page. I turned it on: Amazon suggestions. I opened the camera: Firefly asked if I wanted to buy my coffee table. I tried to get directions: no Google Maps. I tried to watch YouTube: no YouTube. It was like being trapped inside a shopping mall that had removed all the exits and replaced them with checkout counters. Two stars because the headphones were decent."
Andrea from Chicago, IL — ★☆☆☆☆
"The 3D effect made me nauseous within thirty minutes. Not metaphorically nauseous from the realization that I'd spent $650 on this thing — actually, physically nauseous. Turns out having your phone's display constantly adjust based on the position of your face creates a low-grade seasickness that Amazon apparently never tested on humans who move their heads. I returned it. The AT&T employee didn't even ask why. He just nodded, slowly, the way a doctor nods when you describe symptoms he's heard forty times today."
Marcus from Seattle, WA — ★☆☆☆☆
“They called this button "Firefly”
Click to Tweet"I work at Amazon. I bought it because it felt mandatory. I cannot emphasize enough how empty the app ecosystem was. My coworkers and I used to play a game called 'Does It Exist?' where you'd name a popular app and check if it was in the Amazon Appstore. Google Maps? No. Snapchat? No. My bank's app? No. Candy Crush? Mercifully, yes. One star, and I'm being generous because I got a free year of Prime, which I already had."
Linda from Scottsdale, AZ — ★☆☆☆☆
"The Firefly button was right where my thumb rested, which meant I accidentally activated it roughly forty times a day. Every time I picked up the phone, it was trying to sell me whatever object happened to be in front of the camera. My couch. A lampshade. My husband's face. The phone identified my husband as a 'decorative pillow' and offered me three similar options on Amazon. He was not amused. I was, briefly, before remembering I'd paid $650 for this."
The Truth: A $170 Million Lesson in Not Building Phones for Yourself
The Amazon Fire Phone failed because it answered a question only Amazon was asking: "How do we make people shop on Amazon more?" Customers were asking a different question, which was: "Can I please have Google Maps?"
The Verge gave it a 5.9 out of 10, praising the camera and battery while noting the phone was "much less than the sum of its parts." The New York Times compared it to painting your house purple to stand out from the neighbors — technically distinctive, fundamentally misguided.
Nearly every review circled back to the same conclusion: this phone was built for Amazon's benefit, not the user's.
The numbers were catastrophic. Fewer than 35,000 units sold in the first month. For context, Apple sells that many iPhones approximately every forty-five minutes. Amazon's stock dropped 10% the day before launch because investors could already smell the failure. AT&T stores reported "little to no sales" on launch day, which is remarkable for a device backed by one of the most recognized brands on Earth.
Jeff Bezos, to his credit, publicly owned the failure. At a Business Insider conference in 2014, he called it a "bold bet" and compared it to the early struggles of the Kindle. The difference, of course, is that the Kindle succeeded because it solved a genuine consumer problem — carrying your entire library in one device. The Fire Phone solved the problem of "I need to buy more paper towels and I need to buy them RIGHT NOW using my PHONE CAMERA."
The most damning detail: Amazon killed the Fire Phone in August 2015 and, just three months later, released the Amazon Echo — a $179 device that didn't try to be anything other than a speaker that could order things from Amazon. The Echo sold tens of millions of units and spawned an entire product category.
The lesson was hiding in plain sight the entire time: people will happily let Amazon into their homes, but only if Amazon doesn't charge them $650 for the privilege and only if it doesn't pretend to be Apple while doing it.
The Verdict
The Amazon Fire Phone is what happens when the world's most successful retailer confuses "our customers buy a lot of things" with "our customers want a phone that makes them buy more things."
It is a monument to the specific brand of corporate hubris that assumes loyalty to a brand's convenience extends to loyalty to a brand's hardware ambitions. It is $170 million worth of proof that just because you can build a phone doesn't mean you should.
Amazon has reportedly not learned this lesson. As of this writing, reports suggest the company is developing a new Alexa-powered phone, which is either admirably persistent or clinically delusional, depending on your perspective.
We rate it 1 out of 5 shopping carts with antennas.
If you want a phone that treats you as a human being rather than a revenue stream, see our alternatives below.
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✅What to Buy Instead
Google Pixel 9a
Best budget Android with a flagship camera, 7 years of updates, and access to every app that exists — including Google Maps. $499.
Samsung Galaxy S25 FE
Near-flagship specs at 60% of the price, with a telephoto lens, actual Google Play Store, and zero dedicated shopping buttons.
iPhone 17
Best-value iPhone with a great camera, fast chip, and an ecosystem built for users, not for selling them paper towels.
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