Amazon's Fire Phone seeks to reverse Android's ratchet status. Is it possible?

Amazon has introduced a new smartphone, the Fire Phone, with audio and object recognition technology that seeks to make it easier for Amazon Prime consumers to locate and purchase products and services from the nation's largest e-commerce company.

Amazon has included several features that are unusual and useful. One is Mayday, Amazon’s live video customer service, which it began offering on its Kindle Fire tablets last year. The feature lets you call up an instant, on-screen video chat with a customer service representative at the push of a button. Second is the innovative 3-D display that adds a sense of perspective to some of its user-interface screens. The system also allows you to scroll or browse through content by tilting the phone in certain ways. Finally, the an image-recognition system, Firefly, that will let you identify any book, movie, phone number or other object you point at your phone. Firefly is the heart of the phone’s connection to Amazon’s shopping engine. Aim the device at anything around your house, like a bag of cat litter or a tube of toothpaste, and the phone instantly recognizes it and gives you an option to buy the item and have it delivered immediately.

Despites all the features, Fire phone does have a few strikes against it. Most notably is its comparative lack of applications. Both the iPhone and Android smartphones boast more than a million apps. Amazon, which is using a customized version of Android to power the Fire, has only about 240,000 - and many are optimized for Kindle Fire tablets. Due to this heavily modified Android, Fire OS, Google has banned it from accessing the Google Play store, the official repository of Android apps. That is to say the company has work to do to get them into shape for smaller screens. With a cheaper phone marketed at a broader audience, Amazon could have jump-started that process. But a phone whose primary audience consists of Amazon Prime members may not be that attractive to developers.

More challenging than the app shortage is the phone’s novel user interface. While the Fire phone does look simple, it’s thoroughly new. People who are used to iOS and Android will need to figure out new ways to get around this device. That might not have been a problem if Amazon were aiming for a low-end, late-adopter crowd. But the phone is marketing at a price of $649 for the base version without contract. For most people who are looking at a phone at this price are most likely already used to one major phone platform or another. Amazon is asking them to learn something new, without much of a financial benefit for doing so.

Over all, the device lays down a significant marker: Amazon is elbowing its way into yet another market. Amazon is betting that developers will close this “app gap” quickly, and give the Fire all the capabilities its competitors have. But developers won’t jump on board with Fire OS unless people switch to it–and they probably won’t. It’s the classic chicken-and-egg problem of building an ecosystem of software around any particular piece of hardware. Chances are, that market will never be the same.  The phone is a down payment — maybe a long overdue one, maybe not — on a different way to connect customers to an increasing multitude of things they can try and buy. It’s another machine to reinvent the retail experience.