Hi there, and sorry Rob, not trying to be too confusing with my username, but my name is also... Rob. I didn't notice you were the owner of the site til I was registered and making this comment.
My wife lost her Windows phone a Nokia 920, she got when it first came out after an iphone she and I had both had. My newish and only android OS tablet ever had just bitten the dust. I was up for a new contract with AT&T, and just had my iPhone 5 replaced under warranty through the Apple store, and then unlocked by AT&T.
Then 2 days later I had hear this new 3Dish phone was coming out from Amazon this week. I watched the Keynote all the way through, and was impressed with the speed of the phone. They are doing exactly what Apple has done with the "extra cycles". Make cool wizbang graphics.
They do it differently. It is not very well explained. It works just like in the demo. It is not "normal" yet.
Sounds a lot like the iphone launch.
I like the phone. It is not the fastest, it is not the smallest, nor biggest. I don't know if it will ever be rooted, but that's why I am here partly. It has a beautiful screen even having come from RetinaDisplayLand.
It's main drawbacks are it's incompatibility with anything that requires the google libraries to be on the phone, and if you start installing Google branded stuff on it from oh, say 1mobile store, bad things can happen, like the music app stopped working at all for me. By the way after turning on non amazon app purchases, sideloading is just downloading as far as I can tell.
The interface once in an android app, it reverts back to mostly android behaviors such as having a menu, or back arrow at the bottom of the screen. If the phone is in an Amazon app, a swipe up is the back button.
That is one of many borrowed interface elements in the phone. Some things I have had trouble figuring out. The first problem was that a screen protector installed by ATT made the phone think it was still in your pocket when trying to turn it on, so would flash real quick, and by the way, that is how I got introduced to Mayday.
Mayday asked if there was a screen protector, and I made them check everything else first before I took it off, and sure enough, the proximity sensor was being blocked by the protector. They knew of the problem, ATT didn't, and we got the protectors returned. IT went pretty smooth, but that was after a long 4 hours in the store when buying them. Nice. But long wait various reasons, some our fault some their new systems.
ATT is pushing their new alarm system, and a new protection plan that includes up to 6 claims a year for 29.99 a month, or 9.99, or 6.99. The $10 plan is the one we got, cause there is no other way to have a find my iphone/android device manager locator service on the phone without something like cerberus. That it includes protection against loss and theft with an up to $200 deductible, and the $29.99 one though limited to 6 uses a year, includes the same deal on any electronics device you have a receipt for including a MacBook Pro as described by the Manager of the store.
It sounds too good to be true, and must have a catch somewhere, but we will see how long they offer it.
The Amazon phone, is really a nice user experiance. Like in a good 3D movie, it is not a constant yoyo effect. The lock screen is the eye candy, and once you start using the interface you barley notice it... until you peek. Peeking is what they call turning the phone side to side slowly. It is a way to do things like fade in the menu bar and see if the app icon is shiney sharp and 3d, or blurry and almost 2d. That will tell you if it is an amazon or a android app.
Amazon apps, though needing to be updated for the 3d effect, use layering to do most of it, so you get a lot of text that is 3d on a flat color, and the effect is not unpleasant.
It is also a pleasure to see so much freedom in the ability to connect to your computer and drop mp3s into a folder again. Ahh youthful bliss. But I had to right click in itunes and show in windows explorer, and then drag and drop, not too hard, I do wish Apple would open up itunes a bit to other players. No fees.
If you are worried about some stuff, you should be. It will not run chrome well. You can log in to sites from google, and google search looks much better than in the default silk browser, but the google services being absent, makes looking in and adding chrome to the others you sync with is impossible and results in an error that crashes and reloaded chrome every time I tried.
It is not JUST a reskinned android interface, it is a good phone. The speakerphone works reasonably, and the case is a little... plain black and square, maybe even a bit unimaginative. But when was the last time you actually used a phone without a case? This is really perfect. It allows you to put any case they make for it, and there do need to be more of those, and the one I am going to buy as soon as it comes out is the one with the extended battery. Hopefully something comes out soon. This thing sucks juice bad. I read one review where he said, it went down from a full charge to 61% in an hour. That seems a fair assessment. I will have to turn off the eye candy... sorry, dynamic perspective, and see how much difference it makes. I also wish the 4 extra cameras were more of an active part of the interface. I grew up playing Simon.. Beep boop buuuurrrrrrrrrbbb Red blue... you get the picture. I would love if tapping those very visible camera spots would do something useful.
I thought at one point that waving my hand down over the screen in good light was making the top menu drop down, for things like bluetooth and wireless, and airplane mode. I can't get it to do that now. Maybe I was imagining things. The thing am not imagining is the difficultly I have been having flicking my wrist the way they want me too in order to get the leaf style menus to come out from the left and right of the screen. It really needs a feedback practice app so people can get the muscle memory down pat.
Over all it is a little bit this, a little bit that, and all pretty smoothly integrated. I would love root on it, but it is not mandatory nor immediately necessary for most people. It does run a little warm. There are a lot of options in the menus, and the descriptive preferences settings are annoying for me a bit, cause I usually know what I am looking for, say Displays--> Brightness, on most systems becomes an item with a drop down list with "Display" and Adjust Screen Brightness, Turn off automatic screen rotation and others, all fully spelled out. It is kinda nice, then you click on it, and it goes to basically, the same screen, but with all of the traditional lingo and layout there. I want to go to that menu directly one way or another please. I have not yet found a way to do so.
I like the phone. I will be keeping it unless anything major happens with it. I had to reset it after I borked the Music app, and it came right back up twith a backup already saved to the "cloud". Thanks for reading. Will edit later. Bed.
