512 Pixels

Yesterday, Amazon announced its Fire Phone, a 4.7-inch smartphone running the company’s forked version of Android that can be found on its tablet offerings.

The phone is interesting in and of itself. While the industrial design is a little boring, the inclusion of four cameras to power the device’s unique “Dynamic Perspective” technology that takes a 3-D interface and makes it (probably) useful.

The software is just as interesting. The phone comes with an online cloud service. By owning of the whole stack — cloud services, front-end web services and devices — Amazon is sitting at the big-boy table with Apple and Google. I only expect the company to grow these offerings over the coming years.

There is one thing about the Fire Phone that bothers me, though. It can be used as a portal to Amazon’s online store via Firefly, a service on the phone that lets users take a photo of just about anything.

While Firefly does more than link to Amazon for purchasing, it’s clearly the focus of the service.

Here’s Ben Thompson on the subject:

Amazon has always had a unique relationship to the physical world: from a consumer perspective they’re totally virtual, yet their primary business is things you can actually touch. In that sense something like the Fire phone is perfect for Amazon: it tightly binds the virtual to not only what is on your computer screen, but to what is on your hand, and with Firefly, most of the objects you interact with everyday.

The question, though, is if the Fire phone is perfect for Amazon’s customers. Just because someone loves Amazon doesn’t mean their entire life is about buying things. And while it’s true that Amazon has gone to great lengths to make the Fire Phone compelling as a phone, it’s still an inferior offering as compared to a high-end Android phone or especially an iPhone when it comes to things like apps.

Since the Fire Phone isn’t going to burn down (sorry) any existing market leaders, it’s only fair to assume that Amazon’s main push here is to make it easier to buy things.

As I said on The Prompt this week, I’ve purchased daily-use household goods on Amazon.

I feel weird about it. While buying toothpaste online does nothing to help my local economy, the truth is that I’m not buying it from a mom-and-pop store. My six bucks is going to end up at Amazon or Walgreens, and both are multi-billion dollar companies.

There’s no doubt in my mind that technology like Amazon’s can make life easier. We’re all busy, and if I can save that 45 minute trip to the grocery store, my week could be better for it. We outsource and offload all sorts of responsibilities onto services and other people. Why should shopping be any different?

My sticking point comes from my favorite Pixar film.

While Amazon isn’t killing the planet — and probably won’t send us all to space when Earth is so polluted the human race faces extinction — it’s not hard to imagine a world in which the company’s sheer size and ubiquity make it impossible to avoid. Amazon is already my default when it comes to purchasing all sorts of items. As the company grows, I’m only more likely to use my Prime account more and more often.

All that said, I like Amazon for the most part. I don’t think the company is evil, but I don’t want to be in a chair having everything I need to me delivered to my fingertips automatically.

Buy N Large went from being a mere retailer to being everyone’s “very best friend.” It was a a living, breathing, all-knowing conglomerate designed to help and aid humanity, but ended up entrapping them.

Maybe Amazon making purchasing so easy isn’t what we need.

Hell, we’re halfway to this scenario with our always-on screens.

This week’s Prompt is a good one:

With summer here, the boys stay cool with topics ranging from Apple’s “new” iMac, Handoff and the Amazon Fire Phone.

The best way to advertise on 512 Pixels is via the RSS feed. Exclusive for one week, sponsored posts come with a whole pile of benefits. Lots of openings this summer.

Benj Edwards:

Long ago, Mac fans and Commodore Amiga fans fought like mortal blood enemies. But we now live in a far more civilized age—one where Macs and Amigas can walk together, hand-in-hand, along the sandy shores of computerburg.

For that we can thank MorphOS 3.5, a free-to-try Amigalike operating system developed by Amiga and PowerPC aficionados. With a simple download and a CD-burn, you can turn an aging G4-era Macintosh into a modern day Amiga-compatible machine.

It’s inevitable that I sacrifice a computer to this cause.

Jason Snell, in his hands-on of OS X Yosemite:

The design changes in Yosemite are noticeable, but the system is still very recognizably OS X. Longtime Mac users’ fears that the Mac was about to collide with iOS in some kind of crazy peanut butter-chocolate disaster have not been borne out. It’s a forward-thinking design that looks better on Retina displays, pointing the way toward a high-resolution future for Mac users.

I installed the OS on a second partition on my MacBook Air at WWDC, and my thoughts closely track with Snell’s. Yosemite is still OS X. While I don’t care for all the design changes thus far (and am wishing I had a Retina Mac more than ever) it works more or less just like its predecessors. Call me an old man, but that’s what is important to me with these releases.

This morning’s New York Times article on Tim Cook is wide-reaching, discussing Cook’s past, his environmental passion, product strategy and more. The piece praises Cook’s decision to launch the iPad mini and outlines how the CEO is trying to fill the role of his predecessor:

Mr. Cook is amassing a creative brain trust, according to Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, who befriended Mr. Jobs and worked closely with him and Apple’s team on developing a U2-branded iPod, as well as on charitable work in Africa. Mr. Cook is not saying “I’m here to replace him,” said Bono, who is a managing director and co-founder of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners. “He’s saying, ‘I’ll try to replace him with five people.’ It explains the acquisition of Beats.”

The influx of high-level staff has to be balanced with the loss of Forstall and Mansfield, but clearly Cook is trying to round out his roster.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing, and while it’s too early to tell, I believe the strategy will be a successful one.

The end of the article, however, didn’t sit well with me. Chen and Richtel quote developers from Orca Health:

They found one thing particularly jarring in the keynote: Apple did not hew to its tradition of pairing hardware and software. Specifically, Apple introduced a program called Health — which helps consumers and doctors monitor health status, like heart rate or glucose levels — but did not also introduce a piece of hardware to measure those results. That is something the new smartwatch is rumored to do.

“They just released the software,” said Mr. Zeluff, sounding surprised.

“It’s something Steve wouldn’t have done,” Mr. Brown said. It’s an impossible comparison. But it’s the one that Mr. Cook is being held to, at least until he makes enough magic of his own.

Brown’s view on Apple’s new Health platform is something I’ve heard from people who aren’t super familiar with the company, but to hear a successful developer make sure remarks surprised me a little.

More often than not, Apple’s software offerings aren’t paired with first-party hardware. Apple doesn’t sell instruments for GarageBand users, cameras for Aperture users or barcode printers for Passbook fans. iTunes was out for nine months before the iPod was introduced.

Having people disappointed that a watch (that’s never been confirmed by Apple) wasn’t introduced at WWDC is exactly why Tim Cook can’t seem to meet people’s expectations: they are simply unreasonable.

As a big fan of webOS, I really enjoyed episode 44 of Vector. It not only made me miss my old phone, but Rene Ritchie and Derek Kessler’s thoughts on why something so great could fail so completely are very insightful and well-balanced. Even if you weren’t a Palm fan, it’s hard to ignore the fact that webOS holds a unique place in the history of smartphones.

Tom Chatfield:

Graphical use interfaces had existed before, but they had never commanded a general affection to match the eagerness of early adopters. Much like a good map, Kare’s designs helped transform this by providing something beyond information: a human elegance echoing the Mac’s intuitive philosophy of design.

Myke is an excellent podcaster and a better friend. It was an honor to interview him for the 100th episode of his show, CMD+Space.

The Prompt turns 52 this week:

This week Stephen leaves Federico and Myke to celebrate The Prompt’s first anniversary on their own. However, they have the help of David Smith to discuss the App Store after WWDC—as well as a whole host of follow-up and fun.

If by “fun,” Myke meant to write “burning Stephen left and right,” this show description is pretty accurate.

Jeffrey Zeldman:

When my daughter was little, she used to ask me my favorite color. I was a grownup, and could only supply a grownup’s answer: “I love the way light looks in late afternoon,” I might say. Or, “Red and black can make powerful statements in graphic design.” Grownups don’t have favorite colors. But children do.

Rebecca Meyer had a favorite color. It was purple. A color that might be expressed in the hexadecimal language of web design as #663399.

As many of you know, Eric and Kat Meyer lost their daughter Rebecca to cancer on Saturday. Rebecca Alison Meyer was a ray of light. She was six years, eleven and a half hours old when she died.

Zeldman is leading a campaign for people to tweet #663399Becca tomorrow to share their thoughts, which is awesome, but this paragraph really hit me in the gut:

All the caring and all the medicine, all the prayers and all the love from friends and strangers, could not stop this cancer from claiming this child. Caught between horror and hope, all of us watched as the Meyer family fought to save their beautiful middle child’s life. They did everything that could be done to save Rebecca. Then they did more.

Sarah Perez:

PhotoDrive, a fantastic photo uploading service powered by Flickr, is being shut down – but that’s because its founder, Jeff Bargmann, is now joining Flickr, as it turns out. This one-man startup machine had earlier impressed us with his mobile apps and newer photo uploading service, which worked something like Dropbox (or the recent Dropbox acquisition Loom) to provide you with an “infinite Camera Roll” of sorts. However, instead of building out his own cloud storage platform for his latest creation, PhotoDrive instead let you tap into the 1 TB of free storage offered by Flickr.

This is great news. I’ve been using Flickr more lately, and the Mac uploader really sucks. I bet Bargmann can remedy that.