Amazon Fire Phone

Back in 2014, Amazon introduced the Fire Phone, which failed commercially and wound up inflicting a $170 million dollar loss on the company. Basically, it was an unsuccessful attempt to duplicate the iPhone and enter the premium electronics market. Amazon seems to have learned from the experience with the $50 Kindle Fire tablet, which has been wildly successful and offers quite a lot of value for the money.

That said, I recently acquired a refurbished Fire Phone for a fraction of the original cost of the device. I didn’t want to use it as a phone, but it was cheap enough that I wanted to try it as an MP3 player and an ereader.

The reason the phone had to be refurbished became obvious the moment I opened the package and I detected the strong odor of pickle juice.

I suspect the story behind the phone’s “refurbished” status involved the line “hold my beer and watch this.”

That said, once the pickle odor faded, it’s a nice little device. The whole 3D interface thing is a little gimmicky (the view of the screen changes as you tilt it), but other than that, without the phone function it’s basically the iPod Touch version of the Kindle Fire. It accompanied me on a 6 mile run this morning and worked flawlessly, though it does still smell faintly of pickles.

Fortunately, pickles are among my favorite foods, and I kind of want some pickle chips now. 🙂

-JM