@@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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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 RUclips 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.
@@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.
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.
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 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
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'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 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.
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. :)
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 🍻
it's pretty funny how a failure of a phone from amazon from 2014 has better specs and is actually way better than my LG X Style (a 2016 thing) was overall... seems like this one is not a bad purchase tbh
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.
@@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 RUclips 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
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
Android NDS emulation is far easier than N64. You're making the ds seem stronger than it really is, even my old beaten up 1gb ram android tablet could run Spirit Tracks smoothly at 2x resolution. Spec Wise the ds is weaker than the N64
Maybe you need to see an optometrist.. I went from: - Galaxy S4 1920x1080 5" super AMOLED To a shitty: - iphone 5 1136 x 640 4" LCD To a better: - Galaxy S6 Edge+ 1440 x 2560 5.7" super AMOLED Using the iphone made my eyes hurt.. it's like going back from GTA 5 PS4 to PS3
Just go for the Samsung Galaxy Note 3. SD800 with 3GB's of RAM. The 1st 5.7in 1080p60 AMOLED with a new 4400mAh removable 🔋 and the best part of all, it can run nVIDIA's Tegra X1 ver. of HALF-LIFE 2 Ep.1 and 2....lol. But biggest perk of all, it's easily ROOTed and can run Android 10, 11 and 12.
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 just got a 1080 for 210 bucks and a 9700k for 100 Ive already got a motherboard (for free) Psu, Case and 2x16gb Ram sticks from my old build. IVE SPENT MORE ON THE FCKING RAM THAN ON A 9700K LIKE WTF
Oh so that is what happened to it... I remember it's lead up to launch.... It was a hubble affair Amazon like with Luna and the games does not try that hard for some reason.
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.
I rember the amazon phone was sold with t-mobile contracts in Germany... Yeah they imagined the initial iPhone business modell... without being too interesting... Afterall apple is not amazon. Sorry Jeff...
why the four (4) cameras on the front, could it take 3D pictures, with the the four cameras, I would guess Amazon didn't make any 3d viewing apps did they, that would of been a killer app take a photo of and thing, load it into your 3d viewer/edit, then print it out from almost any angle the picture was not taken from, or even, print it out to 3d print, like getting you film photo's developed, Amazon drops off, very large box, with small 10 to 20cm 3D model in side, which are becoming more and more everyday as we type? what a missed opportunity for Amazon, they could have done it all in house, keeping all the profits too.
Honestly I never get why people say screen resolution doesn't matter. For me, it absolutely does. I can tell the difference, and when I use a 1080p phone, picture in picture quality is atrocious. At 1440p, pixels are unable to even be seen with the naked eye. That's the only reason I can watch this video while multitasking.
Fire devices are just really bad Android devices without Google play. I bought the fire tablet for my daughter,after a week the thing barely works. Honestly had cheap Chinese tablets that were significantly better. She is 2 and half and already yells at Amazon for dropping the wifi every 25 minutes. I really don't understand what Amazon was attempting to do with their phone and tablet range. The concept of an ecosystem of Amazon made sense but they really cheaper out on the hardware. Kinda like they went to Alibaba and just bought phones and tablets in bulk. I often see fire tablets at Walmart going for less than the Walmart Onn tablets.
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?
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
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
Back when these first became a big failure amazon cleared them out for stupid cheap but they still had the one year of amazon prime with them. Which wasn't attached to the phone it was literally just a code you punched in. I remember my father purchasing three of these for dumb cheap. Taking out the amazon prime subs and then selling them for the same amount he paid for them on ebay. Kept him in prime service for a goodly while.
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
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…
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
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 love watching your videos, the quality provided is great. Would love to see like a galaxy s3 tested if possible
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.
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 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!
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 RUclips 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.
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.
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 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
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'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 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 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.
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. :)
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 🍻
I'm glad Amazon phone failed. I'd like to see Amazon fail in totality.
Fr💀
Ah, amazon, did they have an ad supported feature? Lmao
it's pretty funny how a failure of a phone from amazon from 2014 has better specs and is actually way better than my LG X Style (a 2016 thing) was overall... seems like this one is not a bad purchase tbh
You should buy and mod a cheap dsi or buy a keyboard phone and mod it for emulation idk
Please don't use Kingroot, it's a Spyware, they will steal literally all od your passwords, it's a keylogger
Had to use it to achieve root. It was since deleted entirely, and replaced with standard SuperSU.
really? On fire hdx 8.9 3rd gen we had to use it
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 RUclips 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
Nearly 10 years? Don't make me feel too old...
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.
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.
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 had one, I loved it. Rumoured fire phone 2 was exciting. Unfortunately it aged poorly and I had to give up on it.
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.
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
How about all those front cameras? Do they work?
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 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 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.
I think that newer linux phones will be much more interesting. Less Google Spyware and nonesense
My school chrombook cpu is slower and has less cors then a smartphone from 2014 (:
People are still selling these 'Rare' phones.. There Rare because there garbage and hardly anyone wanted them 😂
i knew the Corrado is heavy but 7000 kg seems like a slight exaggeration lmao
So what I got from this video is that the phone would have been fine if ANYONE but Amazon had made it.
Yeah, and if it had some better specs without FireOS.
since when there was a version of lineage based on android 4.4.4? i thought android 5 was oldest lineage
I have a question I have 4.4.4 kikat phone and the RUclips app just does not support how did you manage to run the RUclips app
Uh,browser works
3:37 on the spec sheet I dunno if it's correct or not but snapdragon is spelled with an M instead of N
My mother was going to get one of these for her o2 contract, she went for a Sony Xperia instead tho
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 remember seeing this phone on austin evans's video like about 7 years ago and completely forgot about it lol
I own 2 Fire phones and put the Google Play store on both.
hmm, a strange CPU...snapdragom 800
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.
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.
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.
I remember when my friend had one and I was amazed with 4 front cameras.
I worked on this phone. We all knew it was terrible, but Bezos wanted it, so we built it.
Awesome
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 :)
Phones that used to come with facebook? Samsung still ships facebook on $1000 phones...
I use a Nokia 1208 these days.
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
Android NDS emulation is far easier than N64. You're making the ds seem stronger than it really is, even my old beaten up 1gb ram android tablet could run Spirit Tracks smoothly at 2x resolution. Spec Wise the ds is weaker than the N64
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!
Their phones were a failure, but I did end up buying a lot of these fire headphones.
Maybe you need to see an optometrist..
I went from:
- Galaxy S4 1920x1080 5" super AMOLED
To a shitty:
- iphone 5 1136 x 640 4" LCD
To a better:
- Galaxy S6 Edge+ 1440 x 2560 5.7" super AMOLED
Using the iphone made my eyes hurt.. it's like going back from GTA 5 PS4 to PS3
Just go for the Samsung Galaxy Note 3. SD800 with 3GB's of RAM. The 1st 5.7in 1080p60 AMOLED with a new 4400mAh removable 🔋 and the best part of all, it can run nVIDIA's Tegra X1 ver. of HALF-LIFE 2 Ep.1 and 2....lol. But biggest perk of all, it's easily ROOTed and can run Android 10, 11 and 12.
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 just got a 1080 for 210 bucks and a 9700k for 100 Ive already got a motherboard (for free) Psu, Case and 2x16gb Ram sticks from my old build. IVE SPENT MORE ON THE FCKING RAM THAN ON A 9700K LIKE WTF
Oh so that is what happened to it... I remember it's lead up to launch.... It was a hubble affair Amazon like with Luna and the games does not try that hard for some reason.
Man, can you combine some phone motherboards, overclock them (possibly watercool them) and make it like a really powerfull tablet ?
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re still working on this…
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.
Personally I would love that Amazon launcher. Yes it's gimmicky but I would be lying if I say I didn't enjoy those 3D effects lol.
I rember the amazon phone was sold with t-mobile contracts in Germany... Yeah they imagined the initial iPhone business modell... without being too interesting... Afterall apple is not amazon. Sorry Jeff...
why the four (4) cameras on the front, could it take 3D pictures, with the the four cameras, I would guess Amazon didn't make any 3d viewing apps did they, that would of been a killer app take a photo of and thing, load it into your 3d viewer/edit, then print it out from almost any angle the picture was not taken from, or even, print it out to 3d print, like getting you film photo's developed, Amazon drops off, very large box, with small 10 to 20cm 3D model in side, which are becoming more and more everyday as we type? what a missed opportunity for Amazon, they could have done it all in house, keeping all the profits too.
Honestly I never get why people say screen resolution doesn't matter. For me, it absolutely does. I can tell the difference, and when I use a 1080p phone, picture in picture quality is atrocious. At 1440p, pixels are unable to even be seen with the naked eye. That's the only reason I can watch this video while multitasking.
Fire devices are just really bad Android devices without Google play. I bought the fire tablet for my daughter,after a week the thing barely works. Honestly had cheap Chinese tablets that were significantly better. She is 2 and half and already yells at Amazon for dropping the wifi every 25 minutes. I really don't understand what Amazon was attempting to do with their phone and tablet range. The concept of an ecosystem of Amazon made sense but they really cheaper out on the hardware. Kinda like they went to Alibaba and just bought phones and tablets in bulk. I often see fire tablets at Walmart going for less than the Walmart Onn tablets.
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?
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
Wow, I didn't know that Amazon made phones.
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 wanted this phone when it came out. But it was mainly cause I wanted to be different.
¡Oh shiet I remember this phone!, Amazon did make a large buzz about how their idea will be or something.
I prefer the Nexus 5, same SoC!
... is that Sea Breeze by Sergei Mantis playing during the benchmarks?
Amazon flop
Microsoft flop
Nokia flop
HTC flop
LG flop
Damm that is to much flops for today...
Wow I remember watching the flash and one of the dudes would always pull out this amazon phone lmao
Back when these first became a big failure amazon cleared them out for stupid cheap but they still had the one year of amazon prime with them. Which wasn't attached to the phone it was literally just a code you punched in. I remember my father purchasing three of these for dumb cheap. Taking out the amazon prime subs and then selling them for the same amount he paid for them on ebay. Kept him in prime service for a goodly while.
5:22 I don't think the corrado vr6 weights 7000kg, more like 700kg 😆
I got an Amazon Fire 7 tablet. After the updates it was very slow. I de-Amazoned it and gave it to my mun for solitair.
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
I used to use KingRoot but after reading an article about spyware allegations I stopped using it.
7000 kg? lmao i didn't know they made a vw corrado bus
Use an exploit script then installl a custom bootloader
Its same as doing it on a fire tablet
Well, Fire HD Tablets Could be still around today.
I wanted one of these when i was a kid, nowerdays im thankful my mum wouldnt let me buy one 😂
This as my daily driver when they were firesale'd for $100. Eventually the internal memory died
I knew someone who had one. He was always bragging about it. I had my iphone 5s at the time and never saw the need for the Fire Phone.
You should look at the wileyfox swift as a budget phone option in the uk, I still regret selling mine
Kindles are only really good with google play and a custom home sideloaded
Installing stock android seems like it just gets rid of anything interesting on the phone, so now you just have a shitty phone
I remember my mom got one of those back in the day to replace her flip phone but it didn't work very well
Buy a samsung tab 2! And do a vid on it they are cheap now
They actually made a phone I didn't know that