I figured out how to get my Lumia 830 back to Windows Phone 8.1, where it will stay until Windows 10 Mobile is officially released. I’ve now moved back into it.
With that I say farewell to Amazon.com’s Fire Phone as a daily driver. I’ve carried it for just short of four weeks.
I put most of my thoughts on the phone here, but I have a few more to add:
- I thought Dynamic Perspective (the 3D) was really cool when I first started using the Fire, and upon setting it down my affection for it hasn’t waned at all. It’s the phone’s signature feature for both good and bad reasons, but call me a fan.
- I never got used to the position of the camera lens (upper right corner on the Fire; upper middle, but away from the edge, on the 830) or the micro-USB port (middle bottom on the Fire; left top on the 830). I messed one or both of these up every day and never seemed to get any better at it.
- Battery life is marginal. I use my phone heavily and I never turned Dynamic Perspective off, so take those potential grains of salt with my verdict. There’s no way I could get through an entire day with the Fire without charging. I could squeak by with the 830 if I had to.
- The free app every day in the store is awesome, and it really could be anything day to day. I got some cool stuff.
- There are a lot of cool functional things you can do tilting and swiveling the phone, and I enjoyed this feature mostly without incident. However, one day at work I was putting a lot of stuff in the car and moving the phone around a lot, and it was somehow in that gesture-sensitive mode and I didn’t realize it. I accidentally called three different people. It was the strangest butt-dial ever.
At the end of the day, I like the Fire Phone. It’s not a perfect product, but I think it has suffered from a bit of piling on. I found it a perfectly capable soldier, and I enjoyed using it. My view that it’s a fine deal at $100 ($199 with a year of Amazon Prime included) unlocked remains.
I’ll also be watching for the Fire Phone 2 with considerable interest.
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