How did the Amazon Fire phone fail?

When Jeff Bezos decided that Amazon needed to get into the smartphone business, he went all in. The resulting device, Fire phoneand ends up more densely packed with big ideas than any tool you’ll find anywhere. There was just one small problem: most of them were bad ideas.

The Fire Phone shipped in 2014 with a feature list a mile long. The screen had a 3D effect! There were about 400 cameras! There was an entire home screen filled with so-called “Delights!” But the Fire Phone was, above all, a way to buy things on Amazon. This is what Bezos wanted, after all. It’s just Not what users want.

to This episode of Release date, We tell the Fire Phone story from beginning to end. (It doesn’t take long.) David Pearce, Allison Johnson, and Sean O’Kane discuss how the success of the Kindle led to Amazon’s expanded plans for the hardware, the heated battle with Apple over App Store policies, the ways Bezos himself steered the product, and the astonishing speed with which the thing failed. Just a few months after its launch, it was possible to get the Fire Phone for less than a dollar. And people still don’t want it.

Ultimately, the device that was supposed to be the start of something big for Amazon turned out to be very small indeed. But that doesn’t make her story any less interesting.

This is the fifth episode of Release date. (We’re more than halfway through Season 1!) If you want to find the show, there are three good places to go:

Thank you to everyone who has already watched or listened to the show and sent their comments! We’re already working on the next batch of episodes, and we want to hear everything you think we should do, not do, or do differently. What other massive product failures deserve their own episode? You tell us. In the meantime, if you want to learn more about the Fire Phone story, here are some links to get you started: