[yzzxy]

Amazon has no interest in selling cell phones, they want to surface their conglomerate services to consumers through cell phones. Fire COULDN'T have been this phone, it would just be an AmazonBasics style anonymous product to them.

[cmapes]

What you're saying is in essence correct, but I don't think that their fire phone "3d gimic" (which added very much to unit cost) was necessary to achieve that outcome.

I think it was detrimental.

A phone with comparable specs to the Moto G could have achieved their real goal that you mentioned, with the effect of spreading sales opportunities to millions more people. Those millions more in phone sales would have caused many, many more added transactions to the Amazon machine, as I assume they intend with the Amazon Fire Phone.

[yzzxy]

Yes, the 3D gimmick is arguably a bad move (I don't know enough about consumer statistics to comment).

But my point is the goal of Amazon is to sell media/software and everything about the phone is designed for that. The goal of Motorola is to sell phones, and to a lesser extent push the Android platform's market share(due to momentum from time under Google if nothing else). So the Motorola phone is going to have good cost/value, and the Amazon phone is going to have gimmick, gimmick, gimmick to surface more of their products and services to you.