[sea2summit]

The problem with the Fire Phone isn't the hardware, the hardware is great, the problem is Fire OS. No one wants a half baked Android fork and a walled garden. My wife purchased the Fire Phone during their last promotion, and within 15 minutes she was reflashing to CyanogenMod.

The phone would have been successful if they had simply run stock Android, preloaded their own bloatware like Samsung does, and perhaps a dedicated button for Firefly, which is a pretty neat app. The reason the Fire Phone failed was Bezos is an egotistical asshole who doesn't care what the customer wants.

[ewzimm]

I'm not sure what walled garden you're talking about. You can install apps and app stores from whatever source you want, just like stock Android. You can't install Google Play, but that's because Google has restricted it, not Amazon. It seems like some kind of doublespeak to call something a walled garden when someone else built a wall around their app to keep you from planting it there.

[megablast]

Wasn't the phone ridiculously expensive with lots of features that nobody wanted?

Once again, betting on 3d leads to a loss.

[sea2summit]

Yes it was premium hardware; I believe it would have been successful as an Android phone.

My wife actually liked the gimmicky 3D. Go figure.

[dont_pm_me]

How did your wife flash to CM? I believe the Fire Phone bootloader is still locked, so I'm not really sure how that's possible.

[sea2summit]

She used KingRoot. Instructions here: https://goo.gl/ukUc1W