{"id":272574,"date":"2025-11-09T18:26:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-09T18:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/272574\/"},"modified":"2025-11-09T18:26:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-09T18:26:09","slug":"how-the-amazon-fire-phone-failed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/272574\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Amazon Fire Phone failed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">When Jeff Bezos decided Amazon needed to get in the smartphone game, he went all in. And the resulting device, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2014\/6\/18\/5819516\/meet-the-fire-phone\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the Fire Phone<\/a>, wound up more densely packed with big ideas than just about any gadget you\u2019ll find anywhere. There was just one tiny problem: they were mostly bad ideas.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">The Fire Phone shipped in 2014 with a feature list a mile long. The screen had a 3D effect! There were, like, 400 cameras! There was a whole home screen filled with something called \u201cdelighters!\u201d But the Fire Phone was, above all, a way to buy things on Amazon. That was what Bezos wanted, after all. It\u2019s just <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2014\/7\/22\/5923697\/amazon-fire-phone-review\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">not what users wanted<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">For <a href=\"https:\/\/link.chtbl.com\/versionhistory\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">this episode of Version History<\/a>, we tell the story of the Fire Phone from beginning to end. (It doesn\u2019t take that long.) David Pierce, Allison Johnson, and Sean O\u2019Kane discuss how the success of the Kindle led to Amazon\u2019s expanded hardware plans, the brewing fight with Apple over app store policies, the ways in which Bezos himself directed the product, and the astonishing speed with which the thing flopped. Only a few months after it launched, the Fire Phone could be had for less than a buck. People still didn\u2019t want it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">Utlimately, the device that was supposed to be the beginning of something big for Amazon turned out to be very small indeed. But that doesn\u2019t make its story any less interesting.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">This is the fifth episode of Version History. (We\u2019re more than halfway through season one!) If you want to find the show, there are three good places to go:<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">Thanks to everyone who has already watched or listened to the show, and has sent feedback! We\u2019re already putting on the next bunch of episodes, and want to hear everything you think we should be doing or not doing or doing differently. What other huge product failures deserve their own episode? You tell us. In the meantime, if you want to know more about the Fire Phone story, here are some links to get you started:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Jeff Bezos decided Amazon needed to get in the smartphone game, he went all in. And the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":272575,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[971,49,48,195,329,64,61,124931],"class_list":{"0":"post-272574","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-amazon","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-gadgets","12":"tag-podcasts","13":"tag-tech","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-version-history"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}