I’ll take one if they’ll give me $179.
They are pretty neat, and the effective price point of $79 makes it a great deal. Really, the biggest problem was the ‘premium echo chamber’ at launch. Not a bad phone, but most people got turned off by the almost sycophantic marketing compared to the usefulness of its capabilities.
The wife and I both have switched to them. It’s relatively easy to add google play to it and have it function like any other Android phone. It goes on sale for $179 off and on. It’s overpriced at $449 but a pretty good deal at $179.
It hooks into the kindle/audible infrastructure nicely. If you have an old audible account that’s not the same as your Amazon account you will have trouble.
The 3d perspective stuff is overrated and burns battery life. It can be turned off if you want the battery life back. The wife has a game that uses it that she enjoys, but we don’t have any other real use for it.
Audio for mp3s/video is pretty good. Better than the cheap mp3 players at least.
Telephone reception on T-mobile’s network is slightly better than the Samsung Galaxy Exhibit we had before. Data is much faster too. The Exhibit was limited for data.
There’s no memory slot. That’s not been a problem for us so far.
It takes a nano sim rather than any of the larger ones. There have been quite a few reports of the phones not working properly with a punched sim. Mine seems to be doing ok, the wife’s did not and we had to replace her sim.
Greg
If it’s similar to my Kindle Fire HDX, it will need to be rooted to add Google Play. This works fine for a while until either the Google Play store or one of it’s key apps needs updating, and/or the Amazon devices OS needs updating. At that point the Google Play store and apps can start throwing irritating errors that I, as a non-programmer, am dependent on interested developers to create fixes for. And as the device gets older, there are fewer and fewer people interested in making it work for free.
So that would be my caveat…
Why’d you use a phoneArena-watermarked image when there are plenty of unblemished official pics?
As long as it’s the unlocked phone it doesn’t need to be rooted to add google play. The AT&T phone does need to be rooted to add google play.
Not my experience with the Kindle HDX. Even after it was rooted, the Amazon device’s OS itself prevented any access to any URL that would install Google Play. I had to go through a surprising amount of hassle to sideload Play, Store, and other components individually.
I bought one of these under a similar deal a couple months back. I agree, a great deal if you like Prime, so the price is effectively under $100. That put it into my “what’s the worst that could happen?” range for me.
The user experience used to pretty locked into Amazon ecosystem, but a software update a couple months ago liberalized things so that most (not 100%) Android things can be what you expect.
BTW, since this is an Amazon device, if you have Prime you will get free access to Prime Music (which you can stream over the network or download to the phone).
True, no battery removal and no SD card slot, but lots of phones are going that way now.
Play and play store work fine as long as it’s the unlocked phone. I never did get play to work correctly on a fire HD.
not worth it, its garbage
I’ve owned mine for about 2 months and once I integrated google now and sideloaded google play and its whole system to replace Amazon’s, I’m happy with it.
Performance wise and camera wise it’s a steal at “$79” unlocked. Add to that a unlimited straight talk plan at $45/mo (AT&T) and get 5 gigs of 4G LTE to start with, it quickly becomes a no brainer. The camera is decent, and the OS runs smoothly on both native Amazon OS and Google Now’s. 32 gigs should be plenty of storage for most people, and it uses 2 gigs of ram. Far from earth shattering, but, have yet to find a quality phone that can compete at this price and availability to use whatever service you choose.
Like others have said, the battery can be a bummer as it tiers on the lower end. I can get 8 hours of heavyish use out of it max. About 18 hours with light use. Honestly though, I’d consider picking up another as a backup. I will always use the prime service and would be bummed out of I broke this phone and the price went back up to that 449 price point.
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