New handheld shopping device, that makes phone calls too

Yesterday Amazon released another product to their offering, the Fire smartphone. In terms of looks, it is similar to an iPhone with a slightly larger screen.


Why the move into the very competitive smartphone industry? The reason is because people are increasing their mobile spend by billions each year. The Wall Street Journal says it well, " U.S. retail spending on mobile devices is expected to reach $57.8 billion in 2014, representing 19% of total e-commerce sales, according to eMarketer. That is more than double the dollar figure spent in 2012. By 2018, eMarketer sees mobile commerce rising to $132.7 billion or 27% of e-commerce sales."


The way that Amazon plans to get people onto their site and spending is through software called, Firefly. Firefly is some awesome looking software, using the phones camera and sensors the phone can recognise merchandise, music or television shows. Once the phone recognises the item you are then taken to the Amazon store where you have the option to purchase the item with a simple tap on your screen. The result will be that you can walk around a shopping mall, see an item, scan it and then see if it is cheaper to get it on Amazon. The odds are that Amazon will be cheaper than your brick and mortar store.


A further feature of Firefly is that the user can point the phone at a painting for example and get all the facts about the artist and painting.
This type of information at our figure tips is the future, not only for the retail sector. So from that point of view the phone is great.


My biggest problem with the phone is that Amazon do not have the best track record when it comes to hardware. Their standard Kindle is great, but their tablet less so. The bigger problem for me though is that the phone does not have access to a large app store. The Fire will be running a form of Google's Android, but you will not have access to the play store.

Apps (Google Maps, Facebook, Running Apps, Games) are the reason that you buy the phone that you do. The Amazon "ecosystem" is very small, so as an App developer you have very little incentive to create an Amazon app over and above the iOs and Android app already created.


Some cool features of the phone is that it comes with unlimited photo storage on the Amazon cloud servers, it has a 3D looking display and it is $100 cheaper than the iPhone on a comparable two year deal through AT&T.


The goal of the phone is to guide more people to the Amazon store which is where the money will be made. This means that not very many phones will have to be sold for smartphone addition to the family to be a success. Exactly how many phones need to be sold is not clear, Amazon are not very forth coming with numbers.


Going forward the Amazon ecosystem is going to be central to their plans to get people spending online. It still has a long way to go to get anywhere near the ecosystems built by Apple and Google, but they are heading in the right direction. Amazon is still a stock that I like and as people move to online retail, Amazon will continue to grow.