The tale of the Fire Phone, Amazon’s very strange smartphone

When Jeff Bezos decided Amazon needed to get in the smartphone game, he went all in. And the resulting device, the Fire Phone, wound up more densely packed with big ideas than just about any gadget you’ll find anywhere. There was just one tiny problem: they were mostly bad ideas.

The Fire Phone shipped in 2014 with a feature list a mile long. The screen had a 3D effect! There were, like, 400 cameras! There was a whole home screen filled with something called “delighters!” But the Fire Phone was, above all, a way to buy things on Amazon. That was what Bezos wanted, after all. It’s just not what users wanted.

For this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the Fire Phone from beginning to end. (It doesn’t take that long.) David Pierce, Allison Johnson, and Sean O’Kane discuss how the success of the Kindle led to Amazon’s expanded hardware plans, the brewing fight with Apple over app store policies, the ways in which Bezos himself directed the product, and the astonishing speed with which the thing flopped. Only a few months after it launched, the Fire Phone could be had for less than a buck. People still didn’t want it.

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

This is the fifth episode of Version History. (We’re more than halfway through season one!) If you want to find the show, there are three good places to go:

Thanks to everyone who has already watched or listened to the show, and has sent feedback! We’re already putting on the next bunch of episodes, and want to hear everything you think we should be doing or not doing or doing differently. What other huge product failures deserve their own episode? You tell us. In the meantime, if you want to know more about the Fire Phone story, here are some links to get you started: