The world’s first call from a handheld cell phone, or at least the first one ever announced, was placed, in 1973, by a Motorola executive named Marty Cooper to a rival at Bell Labs. Standing on Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue, he used a grayish-beige Motorola prototype with proportions that, considered from a contemporary vantage, recall a child-sized boot. Even then, people enthused about the cell phone’s prospects for evolving into something even more exciting. Popular Science, in a cover story, predicted, “Eventually, the unit could fit your shirt pocket.” The early cell phone, the magazine suggested, could be “a forerunner to a ‘Dick Tracy’-type wrist-phone system.”
The Fire Phone, the smartphone that Jeff Bezos introduced at an event in Seattle on Wednesday, looks, superficially, as much like an iPhone as the next device: glossy, round-edged, largely buttonless, a display a little under five inches tall. But it can do a bunch of charming tricks that are, in fact, like something out of a futuristic “Dick Tracy.” It can change the perspective in games in response to your head movements, make images appear almost as if they were in 3-D (though it isn’t actually 3-D, as some had predicted it would be), and scroll through the content on a Web page—say, a newspaper article—when you tilt it. All this can be yours for a hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, with a two-year AT&T contract.
Amazon wants people to do more of the things people do on their phones—e-mailing, texting, watching TV, listening to music, playing games, shopping—and to do them more often through Amazon. The company has been announcing new services so fast, over the past couple of years, that you’d be forgiven for having missed one or two of them. To name just a handful, Amazon now has a music-streaming service, produces TV shows, makes its own games, and lets you add things to an Amazon shopping list by taking pictures of them with your smartphone.
Until now, the company’s only way to reach customers, on their phones, was to build apps or mobile sites for phones whose operating systems are controlled by two of its biggest rivals—Apple, with iPhones, and Google, with Android phones. In the Times, David Streitfeld relayed an anecdote about coconut flour, from James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, to explain why this is a problem for Amazon: in the future, if you search for the flour on Google and later walk past a Trader Joe’s, your Android phone might send you a message announcing that there’s coconut flour within fifty feet of where you are.
But what if you owned a phone that Amazon had built? Suddenly it would be Amazon that would know all about your coconut-flour habit; when it came time to replenish, Amazon would be the one selling it to you. The Fire Phone comes with a feature called Firefly. If you point the phone’s camera at various things—bar codes, books, DVDs, or even some product labels—and press a button, the phone can recognize the item. It’s not hard to envision how this feature might evolve over time. Standing in front of the Trader Joe’s coconut-flour display, you snap a photo, and by the time you’re home a drone has delivered a version of the product to your doorstep. Meanwhile, Amazon takes note of your purchase, so that the next time you’re listening to its streaming service it can tell you, in an ad, about its latest coconut-flour sale. Firefly also works for media: it can recognize songs, or TV shows, from short clips—the better, of course, to sell them to you through its streaming services.
Amazon isn’t the only company to come up with this line of reasoning. Other Internet companies have tried to make cell phones; many have failed. Google bought Motorola’s cell-phone business, in 2011, for twelve and a half billion dollars and sold it, three years later, for less than three billion dollars; the Moto X, which was supposed to be its flagship phone, never caught on. Facebook partnered last year with HTC on a phone, the HTC First, with a Facebook-branded home screen; that hasn’t done well, either.
Amazon’s phone could be doomed, too, for the same reasons that Google and Facebook had problems: making, and selling, hardware comes with unfamiliar challenges for companies that are used to running Web sites. Then again, Amazon has some things going for it that Google and Facebook don’t. For one thing, it controls what is, by some measures, the biggest store in the world. For another, thanks to its e-readers and tablets, it has experience with making and selling gadgets. People seem to be finding its phone’s newfangled features pretty cool—cool enough, maybe, to get them to switch over from the iPhones and Samsung Galaxies that, after all, haven’t offered much in the way of new whiz-bang gadgetry over the past couple of years.
Cooper, formerly of Motorola, is now eighty-five years old and lives in a beach town in Southern California. I spoke to him this week about how cell phones have evolved since the seventies. At this point, he said, it’s starting to seem silly that we still refer to these devices—mini-computers, really—as phones. And he said he could do without the dazzling launch events. (Couldn’t Bezos just give Tim Cook a call on the Fire Phone from Pike Street and leave it at that?)
But Cooper is as much of a technophile as ever, and he appreciates that cell phones are getting to be useful for more than just calls. The movement-tracking feature on the Fire Phone—now that’s interesting, he said. “The history of computers is keyboards. It’s so awkward. Speech is better—the combination of speech and gestures. Then we’re going to get to a place where these things are reading our minds.”
Photograph by Ted S. Warren/AP.
An earlier version of this article said that Martin Cooper made the first cell-phone call. In fact, he made the first call from a handheld cell phone.
