Amazon’s Forgotten Phone…Any Good?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ก.ค. 2024
- Hello and welcome to another Budget Builds episode where today we're taking at look at the rather obsure, sort of rare, and very very much a failure Amazon Firephone, from the stock usage, through to the specs, and ofcourse modding the phone and getting some benchmarks done. Just happened to have time to make this video between Uni work, so please do enjoy, it was certainly a bit of work to get it all done.
Intro - 0:00
The History - 0:17
Inisital Thoughts 2:17
The Specs - 3:06
Stock General Usage - 4:09
Setup & General Usage - 4:43
Modding the Phone- 7:24
Modded Usability and Issues - 9:26
Benchmarks - 11:50
Conclusion - 14:34
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Specs:
CPU: Ryzen R7 3700X
GPU: Palit RTX3050 8GB
RAM: 32GB DDR4 RAM
OS: Windows 10 - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
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My dad actually worked on this device, the entire product development was outsourced to the company my dad worked at, he used to mention the SOC not being powerful enough to process data from all 4 cameras at the same time.
Truly an Amazon moment
@@My_Old_YT_Account they truly did forsee the failure of the product
Which is wild. The Snapdragon 800 was a beast for its time.
You think ima trust someone with a name like auxesis
@@jajajajajaja867 online privacy. obviously my name isn't auxesis, its an alias I go by online
I'm quite surprised to see a the ROM labelled as 'LineageOS 11' considering that never existed, back then it was CyanogenMod.
Same here
It is normal for these older devices, it is CM codebase but updated and maintained unofficially, thus it is going under the name of LineageOS
'Back then' - Damn I feel old.
same
@@u0aol1 Yes, you should. I had CyanogenMod 7 when it was rather new on the in the West barely recognizable brand 'Huawei' (model "Ideos X3"). Oh how the turns tabled…
The Xperia Z3 was released in 2014 and has a quad 2.5ghz cpu, 3gb ram, 20.3mp main cam with 4k video recording and a 3100mah battery, officially supports Android 6 but custom roms on 10 are avalible, many better options than the fire phone for cheap older phones.
do you have a recommendation for a phone that supports twitter and instagram but has a screen say between 5.5 inches and 6? doesnt have to have special features.
I had the z3 compact. What an amazing phone. Had battery life that was good by today's standards but in 2014.
Those were really really nice phones! Xperias in that time.
Same here, I use my mom's old Z1 Compact (same SoC - Snapdragon 800) with Android 11 LineageOS for my Audioplays/-books there also seems to be an upcoming Android 12 Lineage ROM but it's still in a very early status.
Lg G3 even better and a 2k display!
I used to use this phone back in 2019 when I broke my main phone. Cons: The battery life is pretty bad, it does have stereo speakers, but it sounds very tinny, the only way to install custom rom is to use shady one-click root apps and locked down bootloader is a big shame as this phone shares the same SoC as Nexus 5 and that thing has A11 roms while this thing is stuck on ancient KitKat roms. Pros: it has a really really nice IPS screen (beats today's budget phones for sure), good haptics (not great but again, easily beats today's budget phones) and the performance still holds up surprisingly well. It's also very durable. Overall, it's a solid and premium phone, but nothing special. LineageOS 11 doesn't make any performance improvement at all in my experience, but I still prefer it over Fire OS.
I can't believe I've been watching the channel since 18K subs. The quality of your content has only improved since then, keep it up bro!
You were right, I had not idea that this thing even existed, and I worked at a local Worst Buy, and cell phones were something I dealt with a lot of in my time there. Interesting stuff!
crazy to see this again lol, back in the day my dad ended up getting two of these. we ended up getting them for a hundred someodd each on one of the sale days. I remember one of the main reasons we got them was because they came with a year of prime each which meant they were a better deal. My mom absolutely hated it and gave it to me instead! so yea this was my first phone lol.
I love watching your videos, the quality provided is great. Would love to see like a galaxy s3 tested if possible
I've been watching your videos for years and the quality just keeps getting better. Keep up the good work 👍
Damn this thing is actually as fast as my crappy phone (Samsung A10 2019)
And oh god the mid-late 3D era, they did so many stupid things at the start but it died out just as the technology got to the point of being decent... I wonder if any of that stuff is going to come back
Istorically speaking 3d comes and goes every 30 years, sooooo
Comparing 4-8 year old flagships to current budget phones kinda makes no sense. My 2016 LG G5 which funnily enough cost me less than my Galaxy A12, has much better performance in GPU related tasks.
@@jakakakakakakakakak And my Galaxy A6 from 2019 and it's perfect for me.
I've had a firephone when it came out, I loved it. It wasn't bad for me as a pre-teen but I did enjoy the "gimics". I mean it had pretty good gyroscope, 5 front facing cameras for 3D games specially designed for it. And it had a tilt scroll I got way too used to and missed when I got a new phone. The live wallpapers were also Dynamic so it moved with you when you looked from the sides, top or bottom. There was also a hover touch feature, I type a lot so it was almost incredible to me that I could be typing without my fingers touching the screen. It was like it anticipated my touch. the earbuds that came with it, was pretty amazing and loved them so much, they had great mids and bass, they closely compared to the Apple Earbuds and Samsung Earbuds of the time. Truly one of my favorite Smartphones
I sat through every ad TH-cam spat at me lol, Great video! Always a good day when you upload :)
Thank you, IDK why people get so obsessed over resolutions on phones. They're insanely high for such a small screen and it makes no sense.
I've seen people complain about the Switch's res of 720p and the launch model Switch would be pushing 3-7 hours of battery life. With BoTW? It was around 3. So, sure let's get a 1080p+ screen in there, burn the battery in 15 minutes and jack up the specs and price to make it run decent.
The pixel density of 720p at 5in and smaller is honestly fine. Above 5in though I can definitely tell it is pixelated but I feel that above 5in you don't really need 1080p until you hit about 8in
@@Dimondminer11 I did an experiment with my family last year one using a 1080p 24in 75hz monitor, and a 32in 720p 60hz LCD TV both playing the same content via TH-cam at 60fps via ROKU express boxes at the same time, and out of the 10 people in my family that did it, only 1 guessed correctly because he's into tech like us, the rest either could not tell the difference, or just did not care, and said both pictures looked good. So most people don't care long as it works, and it's not a digital resolution(analog displays like CRT's, and PVM's are a whole other story) of say 240p or less that anyone would say it's garbage on a screen bigger than 4in.
cuz we dont want a pixelated mess eww
@@Maximus20778Like I've said before if you take the average person who is not all obsessed with tech, then they don't really care long as it works, and does what they want/need it to do, and there are far more of those people out there than us.
@@CommodoreFan64 I'm pretty sure someone can notice the difference between 480p and 720p60 unless you don't have a pair of eyes or should I say functioning ones.
I always get happy when you upload, I love the content!! Reminds me of classic green ham gaming
I used to have what was called an Asus Padfone Mini. You should take a look at that if you’re interested.
It was basically a good sized phone that would slot into a base which was an actual tablet, for the x a 10,1 inch and mini 7 inch. Got mine new for $200 through ATT, it was honestly pretty alright and had good battery life. But, I sold it on, so always on look for another one
Been waiting for this video all week
When they were discontinued and available for 150 Euro for the 64gb version (130 for 32gb), i thought about getting one. But i didn't... I would have kept it with fire os. The 3d fun with the four cameras was the only interesting thing about the phone. There are more than enough old android phones around to use with a more recent custom rom.
Watching a giant company like Amazon fail so hard at this left me with a good feeling. Sometimes you need to take your wins no matter how small. Thanks for this video. I just got fired from Amazon and this helped.
I bought one of these just a few months after it released for $100 when Amazon was trying to dump stock. It was a really nice phone for that price. The 4 cameras made the screen look cool, but that only lasted about ten minutes.
I haver two of these at home and was running one with an custom kitkat rom. Was pretty good as a main phone.Glad you made a review. They are kinda easy to get them in germany :)
If they released it today with modern specs and called it the Alexa Phone I'm sure it'd be a success
I mean fire os still dose not get updates the app store sucks. So if they made that would they make a new os or use andorid
Not really, market is flooded with better Chinese phones.
@@aleksazunjic9672 I was just saying to be honest amazon will probably copy a Chinese phone then brand it
If there's a rubbish app store it makes your u feel like you got some knockoff lame device
The only way a new phone from Amazon like this would be successful is if they followed the Kindle Fire / Kindle e-reader business model which is sell at a lost and expect people to spend more money on Amazon services to help make up the difference and then they could also ban price-competetive phones being sold through their website to help improve sales.
I don't think calling it the "Alexa" phone would really work as quite a few people would just start calling it a "Portable Telescreen" as in the spying device used in the book/film 1984.
I had this phone and it was nifty. Amazon's customer support was also exceptional when this ran - they'd replace the entire phone with a mild scratch.
I got one during the Fire sale (no pun intended) for £99 and it was my only phone for a year. It was a a conversation starter and people loved playing with the 3D screensavers and games on it. The maps function had 3D maps for major cities as well.
The Firefly function (sort of like Google lens) was very impressive as well.
Overall, was a fun device and I still have it somewhere. One annoying design fault was dust got into the casing and into the camera lens so you used to have to take it apart and clean the lens every few months.
great video man :)
Nearly 10 years? Don't make me feel too old...
I love these obscure/old phone videos. Today I picked up an old Microsoft Lumia 550 from ewaste. Only had a really dirty charging port. Cleaned it, and now it works great, it does have some dead pixels though.
What do you mean by "from ewaste"? Did you get it out of a bin or something?
@@jacobnunya808 There's these ewaste containers where I live, and they basically let you take whatever you want from them. (Yes, I do live on TH-cam LOL, that's why I replied so quickly)
it's a facility where old and unwanted electronic go before it got recycled, you can go there pick something you wanted and pay the owner a bit of fee sometime free and you good to go, only a few country have ewaste tho like USA Australia UK Japan where electronic got thrown out the most @@jacobnunya808
Ah, amazon, did they have an ad supported feature? Lmao
Very interesting video! I've always been interested in the fire phone because of it's quirky features. It wasn't exactly a good deal, but it's weirdness makes it stand out from a lot of other older android phones. It's certainly a cool device today since it was a one-off. Unfortunately, they're quite hard to find so seeing the occasional revisit to it is always a treat. :)
Awesome video thank you!
I have an LG G3 with nearly identical specs and I have to say: my eMMC is still as fast as new.
Also: have you considered adding OMW (OpenMorrowind) to the testing suite? It's more demanding and can be run off of the SD card.
This phone has the same SOC as a Kindle Fire HDX 2013 which was a very nice tablet after you flashed a rom onto it. Like the Fire Phone you rooted it using Kingroot and it also had ROMs that worked using the locked bootloader, but luckily exploits to unlock the bootloader were found.
I actually unironically bought this phone in 2015 as my main device after the price drop to £100. I installed CM11 and was left with a device that had absolutely no competition in its price range specs-wise (at least from what I remember). I only replaced it because I couldn't update it beyond android kitkat.
i remember seeing this phone on austin evans's video like about 7 years ago and completely forgot about it lol
I remember when my friend had one and I was amazed with 4 front cameras.
I loved Amazon's Fire Phone, one of the best phones I've ever owned. As soon as you got the Google Services on it, it was a great device. Not now of course, it's a very outdated phone now.
I remember implanting a boot loader under a boot loader to run ICS (iirc) and just going wild with it. Loved that phone tbh
I had one until it was stolen. It worked real well for me. I installed the Play Store and all required services, so it was an Android phone with unique features to me. I worked retail at the time, and the product look up was extremely helpful when I wanted to find something we didn't have in stock for someone, and people seemed to appreciate it. I do miss it. If Amazon released an updated phone with the same (but improved) features, I might get one. Especially if I went back into retail.
I remember seeing a ton of ads for this thing back in the day. It always seemed like the tablets were good, so if anyone could do a phone, it was them, only for it to massively flop.
The dog got camera shy at the end!
6:28 "Someone will see it and think it's cool, but in reality does it help you? Not really." 3D television has entered the chat.
Great video as always, but when you can get something here in the US like the Alcatel Glimpse(5002C) for $40 USD running Android 10 Go Edition to what you want to do, then the Amazon phone just does not make sense to go through all the hassle.
My main memory of this device is the initial teaser ad campaign where they tried to create this big mystery about what the new product when everyone immediately knew it was a phone version of the Kindle Fire.
I actually love your furniture.
My friend had one of these as his first phone in 2016, he had it for a couple years until he replaced it with an iPhone 7. Might see if I can have it!
... is that Sea Breeze by Sergei Mantis playing during the benchmarks?
Your voice is perfect for how it's made
I had one of these and got it for fairly cheap after amazon started dropping prices on them. Despite the hate for them I actually liked it, the biggest problem though was the lack of the google play store. Otherwise it was a great phone, I even found a battery case for it and it lasted for several days.
I owned this phone LONG ago. I got it when it was discounted to 200 USD, because at the time new it was a really decent choice. The screen looked nice and big, the system was responsive enough, the camera took pretty nice pictures, and with a little bit of patience you could get google play stuff sideloaded and it was basically just another android phone
I contemplated getting one of these years ago, but went with a Moto G3 instead. Glad I did.
wow.. i drooled over this as a kid… can’t believe it’s considered rare now.
I loved this thing. It was my daily driver for 2 years, I bought it for £100 a year after it came out so it was the best budget phone around. It wasn’t great without mods and it crashed a LOT but when it worked it was fast, and it worked well.
No case came with the phone, I didn’t even know a case existed tbh
Also I remember the default keyboard being amazing
I had one, I loved it. Rumoured fire phone 2 was exciting. Unfortunately it aged poorly and I had to give up on it.
I used own this phone ..the o.s used to update to a mobile version of the fire tablet at the time ..also play store was easy to install
Hey there! Could you post the link for the keyboard APK? I've got an old KitKat tablet around, and it would be nice to have it. Thank you!
Would love to see a video on the strange midpoint (2012 ish) era of proprietary OS phones with a dedicated Facebook/Twitter button. I personally had a Vodafone 555 because it looked like a budget BlackBerry. It was hands down the worst phone I’ve ever used.
i have very, clear memories of this phones commercials. i always remembered kids in commercials, showing it as a gaming device.
i had a fire tablet, and a ipod touch at the time, and i always perfered the ipod. even the fire, new, as kinda...meh. even adless.
it wasn the slick, thin android my mom had, nor was it as nice as my ipod. the cameras were crap, and even then i just remember saying "who would want this?"
Wow I remember watching the flash and one of the dudes would always pull out this amazon phone lmao
excellent video hamish ! but how DARE YOU not show us the 5 camera system in use >:( got excited all for nothing
How about all those front cameras? Do they work?
You should look at the wileyfox swift as a budget phone option in the uk, I still regret selling mine
Fascinating video! Amazon's reskin of Android has always sucked - it's what put me right off their Fire range; I'm perfectly happy with my old Paperwhite for reading, but I'll stick to my regular phone for actual shopping and media playing, thanks! As a mobile IT support guy I encounter Fire tablets frequently and was astonished at how closely this phone STILL matches even their newer devices. They still very much feature that awful dumbed-down experience where common things like task manager and the Back function are stupid hard to figure out. I really don't know how the elderly (their main demographic for Fire devices other than the Firestick) manage.
I love linguistic differences like “oh-pera” and “aw-pera.” There isn’t a right pronunciation, just regional differences based on where we grew up. Cheers 🍻
The SOC is NOT underpowered. Its what was in the Note 3. Which, for its time, was the 1st or 2nd SOC for performance metrics, depending on what you were doing. Both in gaming and every day use. The iPhone of the time had the ONLY other SOC that was ANYWHERE near the SD800.
I dont know why the Amazon phone had such a bad implementation of the SD800. Having 2GB RAM instead of 3GB (Note 3) was probably part of the issue. Since HD screens were being used in many high-end phones. HD video decoding was pretty CPU intensive.
I had a fully bootloader unlocked and rooted Verizon Note 3 and had ZERO issues with usability or any custom software I installed. ROMs/Kernels/etc all worked as well as they were programmed. Which leads me to believe that the SD800 in the Amazon phone was running very flawed software.
There was also a amazon phone launched in india called Tenor ( 10or ) it was a brand of amazon had amazon sigin in and all.
God heavens, didn't know the Corrado G60 was so heavy!
i do believe you can unlock the bootloader now. I did it for my kindle fire hdx 8.9 3rd gen
I remember my mom got one of those back in the day to replace her flip phone but it didn't work very well
Man, can you combine some phone motherboards, overclock them (possibly watercool them) and make it like a really powerfull tablet ?
its worth mentioning the real killer of this phone was the lack of the play store and also that it never got it's android version bumped
Did any of the 4 cameras work on a custom rom?
Hello Mr. Budget, if I may suggest, you could slap a Dreamcast emulation test for these kinds of phones in the future. Readream emulator is highly recommended. Thank you.
I remember when this came out, I kinda wanted it
3:37 on the spec sheet I dunno if it's correct or not but snapdragon is spelled with an M instead of N
I had one and I kinda liked it.
i like how once Android 4.4 has been installed you say "Now we're ready to go with a Real Operating System" lol
Torque pro is 110% worth the purchase. I keep a galaxy s4 with a remote app for tvs and torque pro on it for working on my cars. Great video tho!
I bought and still use one of these with no sim card... makes a good pocket sized e-reader with text to speech for kindle.
My mother was going to get one of these for her o2 contract, she went for a Sony Xperia instead tho
saw that little gts 250 ;)
You should buy and mod a cheap dsi or buy a keyboard phone and mod it for emulation idk
My main phone died a few month ago and I didn't want to buy a new phone. I found a Motorola G8 on ebay for just £30. It was listed as not working because the screen was cracked but since I don't care about that it works perfectly fine for me. The phone is both great and rubbish at the same time. It's a 2020 phone which doesn't support 5Ghz dual band wifi. Even my Sony Xperia Z1 from 2013 supported that. Download speeds are therefore bad. Surprisingly the 720p screen doesn't bother me much.
The best parts of the phone is a micro-sd card slot and a headphone jack. I need both for long walks in the countryside, listening to music, locally stored hiking maps and taking photos/videos.
For £30 it also has a good processor, decent 4GB ram, decent cameras and good battery life.
2014? jesus, feels like yesterday
I must be old
I had a Kindle Fire 5th gen that was complete shit. The back camera was always broken, the charger port broke easily (and all of my sibling’s had theirs break too), and Fire OS was really annoying. At least it could read books?
My sister had one of those - weird thing with the 4 camera's...
My mum got sold this phone by O2, I think she only lasted 6 months with it before buying out of her contract and getting an iPhone, but I do remember playing some gimmicky but fun Amazon Fire specific games
I traded this in along with a Firefox OS phone and an original Ubuntu Touch BQ Aquaris e4.5 and got a Mac Mini. Still regretting it now. Should have kept them, but hey-ho such is life. My Amazon Fire phone was my daily driver for over a year then support was gone and apps stopped working. The rooting on mine failed (due to my lack of skills back then) and i couldn't get it unlocked from O2, so goodbye Fire phone. Apart from that it served me well.
Huh, I thought a locked bootloader means the bootloader checks the hashes of whatever recovery or OS image is booted and prevents and non-signed/authorized images from booting. Is that just the case on newer Android architectures or did I. misunderstand all this time?
Your thinking of dm-verity. Locking the bootloader is just preventing you from flashing anything. If you can find a way to flash on a phone old enough to not have dm-verity you can do anything :)
This as my daily driver when they were firesale'd for $100. Eventually the internal memory died
I was intrigued by the FirePhone when it was announced and I thought it was interesting when I finally got a chance to see and interact with it in person. It wasn't a bad phone, but it lacked the play store (which you could side-load) and the UI was kinda garbage. It had potential, but not using Android directly is really what killed it. Basically the same reason why Palm and Blackberry failed: limited application libraries. If you don't have Apple or Android app store functionality, you basically lose the smartphone game. Even as a long-time Android phone user, I do wish that their store could be as polished and curated as Apple's app store, though I also appreciate Google's willingness to play ball with emulators, so I guess I'll just have to deal with the thousands of trash, ad-filled apps cluttering up the app store on Android instead.
me: what processor does it have
budget:"Snapdragom 800"
qualcomm:sees the video
them: find his exact cordinates he has many of our chips in his home
budget:gets airstriked
Can you do a video on the rx570 and rx580
You should have tried gsi roms on this and bitgapps that will be fine i guess
The VW Corrado is a really nice car
Almost bought one in highschool. Glad I bought a driod instead.
5:18 CORRADOOOO!
Things we never got in my country haha
I worked on this phone. We all knew it was terrible, but Bezos wanted it, so we built it.
Awesome
I had it 1 year after my Nexus 5 died because same Hardware. But I Installed a Google launcher and store without root and it was a good phone. I used it 1 year until the huawei p10 here in Germany.
My biggest problem was the usb port
I have a question I have 4.4.4 kikat phone and the TH-cam app just does not support how did you manage to run the TH-cam app
Uh,browser works
Where to find live wallpaper for android?
I got this for my brother since he didn't have a smart phone and it was 100$ and came with a year of prime. We just ditched Amazon's os and put in regular android