Extra vids for Floaties! www.floatplane.com/channel/Th... Car Channel: / @garbagetime420 Game Channel: / @helloimgaming Drum Channel: / @the.drum.thing . Custom iPods by Elite Obsolete: eoe.works
I'm too paranoid for that many cameras. I have tinted tape over my front facing camera on my phone. I don't want 5 cameras facing me every time I use my phone. Edit: Paranoid: "unreasonably or obsessively anxious, suspicious, or mistrustful" I'm aware that this is an unreasonable fear; I literally stated that in the third word.
@@Schnort Buy a ZTE Axon 40 Ultra, it has an under display camera, which is so awful that no-one can spy on you. Rest of the phone is bloody awesome tho.
Used to work for Amazon's Device Tech Support (I started working after the Fire Phone was discontinued) and, I remember the training we had for that phone is just a slideshow, like one slideshow to provide troubleshooting steps. And I worked there for years and I remember the one time I had a call about the Fire Phone is for an old lady and her phone isn't working, I actually provided her a 15% discount since the device is no longer in warranty (and no longer in production). And she was really worried that she can't use Firefly anymore, and I told her that Firefly (The camera thingy that scans an item and redirects you to the Amazon website) is still available on the Fire Tablet and what she said is "What? I've been using this crap for years because that camera thing is really helpful and you could've told me earlier that it's available on a tablet?" and she was upset, like crazy upset and had this like 15 mins rant about how this phone is a hot garbage and she could've bought a new iPhone instead of sticking to the device.
To be fair it was a massive personal fail on your part for not tracking her down beforehand and educating her on the use of Firefly on other devices. How could you possibly justify being so negligent in your duties?
The fact that they made a phone with a gimmick that makes you want to move and rotate your phone, and then made it so that rotating your phone switches the screen is such a hilarious oversight
I could do the same with my Nokia N8 using the built in gyrometer and a symbian OS written app i downloaded for free from the web. It didn't give me backgrounds, but i could use the phone to tilt images that the camera would take in burst mode, if i moved it side to side at a certain speed. The app would process the images and create a 3D feel for it. The same person wrote an even better app for the 808 which took advantage of the way the sensor was built and you didn't even need to do that anymore, just burst images and it would allow you to make a 3D image directly. IMO, considering how bad for complex stuff, Symbian was, the cameras on this Android based phone are there purely for data gathering. Note how they track his face...
Wonder if different devs worked on those features without realizing the other features existed. If I were to put a tinfoil hat on, I would say Amazon underpays their devs (as they do warehouse workers), so they just aren't paid enough to care.
@@HooLeePhucingSheet I don't really believe conspiracy theories like that, so I'm gonna say they weren't trying to spy on people (i mean, look at Oculus headsets, if they're spying on people with the camera arrays, that will be a HUGE lawsuit), but this definitely only needed one camera. In robotics, we use single camera systems all the time for basic 6DOF tracking of objects (location and rotation in 3D). If you know the size of the object, and measured it relative to the camera view (typically just a rectangle bounding box around it, no need for more than that), then you can do some math to calculate distance based on the relative size to the calibration size (this is what the calibration card for the original Xbox Kinect was for, it was an object with a known size). As for the other axis, location is easy, it's just the position of it in the camera frame once you've figured out depth. Rotation is a little harder because you have to do some fancy math, but often you will use feature tracking for that. In feature tracking, a fast computer basically automatically finds tons of key points in an image, and then looks at the next frame, finds as many of those features as possible again, and does some math based on how they all moved relative to each other to calculate how the object moved in 3D. This is technically all you need for a basic 3D representation, but you still have to align it with reality. A similar thing is done for motion capture. You'll see in professional motion capture setups, they have a bunch of grey ball things on the actors. Those are retroreflective trackers, so they reflect light directly back at the source (which will be next to a camera), making them shine very brightly, and giving an easy feature for a computer to track. Motion capture systems do this automatically, but you can do face tracking like this manually in something like Blender by drawing a bunch of black dots on your face, recording something, importing it, telling Blender where the dots are, letting it track them, and then parent those trackers to the corresponding face bones on a 3D rig. You could also do this with full-body tracking, but you would need to manually handle trackers leaving the frame (if using a single camera), and you would need a skin-tight suit (light clothes can move around on your body, and therefore move the clothes with them. tl;dr 3D tracking is both easy and hard depending on what you're doing, and i went on a tangent about that the fire phone could've done the "easy" single-camera method, and been perfectly fine.
I worked at Amazon doing customer service during the initial rollout of this crap phone. They used to run this internal program where people would "SOS" into live customer support; as an Amazon SOS CSR (customer service rep) , you'd basically display on peoples kindle tablets and fire phones like a little OS livestream/ lets play or something to try and help the customer learn the features of the product, and help them troubleshoot or find things. Being in this department, they had sample models for the CSRs to play with and basically teach themselves how to use the products they were supposed to be supporting; they had these phones out for people to play with along with the tablets and I shit you not, they were broken and glitched straight out the box, so we largely avoided them. Then people would SOS in and try to get help using this crap phone, only for the phone to instantly crash when they used the system; you could get maybe five seconds of audio out before the customer's phone would crash so hard it would reboot, leaving us SOS agents trying to cram three sentences in about how they should just call in to try and get support cause this is a known problem and we have no ways of helping. When you saw someone was SOSing in from a fire phone, you knew there was nothing you could do XD
I actually saw the whole keynote speech about this phone when it was just announced, and they made it sound like the cool new thing everyone should have. I was super into it and wanted one so badly. Until suddenly I learned that it wasn't regular android and wouldn't do regular apps... yeah I'm not surprised it flopped. I was 100% into it and a single tiny fact dropped my interest all the way to zero. Amazon tried to make everything happen with their own store and that killed the whole phone for me. Kinda glad about it now that I can see what a nugget it was even apart from the OS problem...
@@HKlink Every smartphone that hasn't had access to google apps has failed. Apple and Google own the market literally, If you don't get into their club (and that leaves just one door because you ain't ever getting into Apple's lol), Then it's over for your device.
I remember getting one of these phone just for signing up for prime. Had to send it back after I cancelled prime in the trial period. But it was actually nice that I could find every movie by just filming it for a few seconds. Always wondered what happened to these.
A big turn off with Fire devices for me was the fact that it run on an Android based OS, yet blocked access to Google Play store - and Amazon app store was basically not well known and didn't have much on it
Fr, growing up during that time and being into this stuff was very neat with how fast everything was going and changing. I’d go back and forth between an iPhone and an Android flagship every upgrade to see what was going on. Funny thinking about constantly flashing ROMs and stuff now.
A part of me misses the days of the cellphones with the full slide-out keyboards. I had the Android Ally and I loved that thing. It having a full keyboard with directional keys too made it a really nice phone for playing some app games. It was an incredibly thick phone as a tradeoff though, of course.
Mine served me well as a late middle and early high-school phone. I loved the lock screens, especially the animated ones, and it came with a killer puzzle game where you had to connect flags on a 3d cube using colored squares. The phone held up well, considering I never out a case on it, and it's still mint looking somewhere. I'd rate it 10/10 on being dropped in a bowl of cereal, and still working without getting dried off. It's a shame the battery on mine just stopped working suddenly, I'd probably have to put a new one in just to get any photos off it, but I liked it
my first phone was my mom's hand-me-down amazon fire phone and it sucked so bad. i couldn't even download the instagram app. or the youtube app. i couldn't download so many apps. i was trapped within the shackles of the fire OS. i destroyed it a couple years ago just for fun. this video is kind of nostalgic for me, though. seeing how the phone looked and worked is pretty nice to see again
@@beezy7285I think they ment that your mom didn't intend it to be a hand-me-down, but rather a horrible experience for you to experience for fun. TLDR Your mom hated you, (joke) and wanted you to suffer for fun.
I worked at AT&T when this phone was launched and they tried to hype it so much they gave 3 phones for my employees to try it and learn it and they hated it. We could see the flop before the launch from the promo material. The promo shirts were super comfortable tho I still wear them to this day to go workout in.
@@ItsHonski Not if you were able to root it and flash new firmware. 50 bucks for Cyanogenmod 11 (basically Vanilla KitKat) on a Snapdragon 800 in 2014 would have been really sweet - I mean I paid 180 for a new Moto G2 with a Snapdragon 400.
@@Alias_Anybodysub. For the time, even at the $160 discounts the year after, you were getting pretty good, premium specs for the time for a steep discount. A root flash would’ve made it worth it, though that would probably break the funky camera feature - which to be fair, that gimmick would wear out pretty quick, plus I’m quite positive it doesn’t exactly have a fantastic impact on the battery life.
@@Alias_Anybody yeah and then watches you while Amazon sells your data to China while you enjoy flappy bird (insert ROM here because you couldn't understand the joke I was making with normal users of phones) lol
I love how there were conspiracy theories about Apple stealing your face data when they added an IR camera for the very legitimate reason of replacing the fingerprint scanner. Meanwhile, Amazon put 5 face tracking cameras on their phone for seemingly no reason.
We've known about data tracking for a long time. Just cause one company is doing it doesn't mean literally every other one isn't. You really think Tiktok blew out cause they gave their platform out of the goodness of their heart?
@@Scorialimit why it's banned for soldiers now due to it using the gps in the background of the phone and sending the data to China.. It allowed all sorts of secret bases to be found due to people patrolling with their phones around the bases and TikTok already knowing they are military.. They used AI to detect patterns used by patrols.. Also it came out they turned the microphones on in the background and sent the recorded data to Chinese servers..
I was one of those few who owned a fire phone, albeit in 2016, but I actually loved it. I filled it with emulators and it ran them all flawlessly, especially dreamcast. Pair that with a Dualshock 3 controller and a clip-on phone mount, and it was one of the best portable emulator setups available.
That's sincerely great and all but it doesn't have to do anything with it being a Fire phone. You can do that on any regular Android, or even a jailbroken iPhone, and still have access to mainstream app stores.
@@__JiG__SaW__ perhaps the point he was trying to make is that he was able to get good use out of an otherwise cheap, but dogshit phone. If you can't see the correlation then that's on you
Reminds me of when 3D screens were all the rage. There were 3D phones, TVs, even the Nintendo DS went 3D. The fad died out super fast and I honestly keep forgetting that the TV and Blu-ray player we have at home can play a movie in 3D
The great thing about the 3DS was, it was an amazing console in its own right and a real, tangible improvement over the OG DS. Its 10+ year lifespan speaks for itself. Plus it has what I still consider to be one of Nintendo's best handheld libraries. They could have just cashed in on the 3D fad and been done with it, but they went above and beyond and I'll always love it for that.
@@ShaCaro Sure, but that was my point - the 3DS wasn’t that. The 3D gimmick was heavily marketed (initially) but take it away and you still have one of their best systems. Unlike the Wii or Wii U, it didn’t live or die on its gimmick and that’s what’s so great about it.
I had to demo one of these when I worked for at&t. The best part about that phone was the display. I gutted it when we tore it down and got a really great board and SD card that was designed to play songs the phone could identify. I also got some free LEDs out of it.
I actually did have a fire phone for a year or two in 2016 because I guess it was the cheapest option in our plan. I still have it actually, the problem is that it's bricked because I think I tried to jailbreak it to be less restrictive. But yeah, it did have a decent amount of space on it for the time and the whole 3D graphics thing was a nice little gimmick.
Much like all Amazon endeavors under direct Bozos action. Willing to bet that the guy had no hand in Amazon, and that the place was run by people who buffered his stupid, much like they did for Melon muZk. Rich people aren't smart, they're just incredibly lucky to have been born in wealth. All those stories about "gifted" tech wizards and whatever, starting in garages and other bs, are just a load of crap.
They advertised it on every box you ordered from amazon, with orange tape. You saw the ads. It failed because it sucks not because of lack of marketing
@@afwaller Im going to say it was both. Hell man I worked at Amazon at the time and I didn't even know. Who actually sits down and reads the box. Before opening it and throwing it away. The produce was trash though and word of mouth would have got more then 35k sold if it was good.
I had one of these stinky bois when it came out. For some reason, the screen felt incredibly dry. I felt I was going to scratch the screen by just swiping. Also, it was stinking slow after a month.
My first "new" iPhone was a 6, I still have to this day, not bent, even after multiple battery swaps. The only thing is the screen has a few darker areas. Amazing how things can last if you look after them...
its fun seeing the phone my dad worked on being trashed around like that, also the team that worked on the device knew its state and knew that it was going to be a tough sell, but even they didn't expect it to sell that poorly. They even knew that the SOC couldn't handle 4 cameras at once without stuttering. But Jeff wanted it ✊
I bought it. It's so unreal. Looks like a developer kit. BTW, I ordered on Amazon (desktop web version) a book and it was downloaded automatically on the phone. I've got a small e-reader, to be honest 😅
Fun fact: When the phone plays an advertisement it will know (through the 5 front cameras) if you are intrigued/watching the ad or not. Hooray Amazon spying on people again.
But then everyone cites lack of google apps on it. Even in this video, as if Google spying is any better or more ethical. I don't even use Google apps or a Google account on my phone. I use alternatives. I saw how deep and virus-like Google Play Services goes, how much of a hit it takes on battery and performance, and just said nope. Not to mention that news story of the father who got labeled a pedo beause he sent photos to his doctor of his son's genitals during the pandemic and Google told the police and cancelled his account. The guy did nothing wrong. then the bike rider who got arrested because he just rode past a home that recently got robbed and Google used his location history against him. At least if you criticize Amazon, or Microsoft, include Google as well.
I used one of these phones for a good while. Pretty good when it was unlocked, sold for cheap, and with an AOSP ROM installed. Somehow I managed to buy 3 - each for less than a year’s worth of Prime. Then activated all 3 for 3 years of Prime and sold 2 of the phones for more than I paid for them.
This is my friend's second Kindle. ru-vid.comUgkxOnUR4NaproSbBbD2sdI4XcDZ58Jz8GOx The first one which is about 5 or 6 years old quit charging because the bottom connector went bad. When I saw they upgraded to a USB C connector I knew it was time. I think the old USB Micro connectors are a PIA. Her new one is great. It synced right out of the box and connected to WiFi immediately. The thing is perfect! Sooo mine will arrive tomorrow. (Been reading off an old Fire) What bugs me are the reviewers that give this product one star because it didn't work out of the box or they were too dumb to figure it out. If it doesn't work send it back and get another one. It couldn't be easier with Amazon. Giving it one star because it didn't work says nothing about a good one that does work. I bet a bad one is one in a thousand or more. Give it a break...just get another one.
Really appreciate the authenticness of Dankpod's videos. It's not him being overhyped about everything and just slapping loud memes and noises in the video all over the place, it's just him being a goof, and we get to learn a bit about certain tech and audio stuff, and what's junk vs. what's decent. Fun education done right. 👌
Well it was a step in the right direction. I believe a newer released version with the "staples" included and shake off all of those front facing cameras and Amazon might be up to something!
Man, that HTC One M8 at :45 is a throwback, honestly probably one of my favorite phones I've ever had, it's a close call between it and the Note 9. HTC really built a solid phone back then, I ran mine with the dot view case for a long time (which was a really neat idea for a case) then eventually just went caseless, the way the metal back wore in looked so good. I'm gonna have to dig it out of a box somewhere and see if it still works.
I love how this channel went from an iPod repair channel to archiving manky old tech. I myself love manky old tech and this channel quickly became my favorite comfort channel. Never change Wade. We love you.
I remember being at an att store with my mom when the fire phone just came out and I remember the worker literally just saying it's bad and not worth buying which was funny considering that store usually had workers push products more than car dealers
I had one of these bad boys for about three years (ages 13-15.) Served me well, though a few weeks into my ownership I sat on it funny and shattered the Gorilla Glass™️ back. It was pretty cool despite the shards. If I wanted to keep my hands warm in the winter, I'd just run a weird Blender-lite app and it'd heat up real nice. Near the end of its life I had to turn off the fancy 3D screen movement to preserve battery. The wallpapers make me really nostalgic tho omg :) The proprietary app store really was absolute garbage. There were a lotttt of apps it didn't have, and until the last few months of using it, I never knew about being able to get the Google play store on it. Though the built in browser was really good and I kinda miss it. For a little weirdo who liked to read a lot, it was a pretty alright first phone. 6/10
@@Sporklift my little htc had died and as a broke 20 something I considered the free year of prime on top of the sale price the true part of the bargain. 😂 It hardly worked at my house and got replaced by a hand me down
They sold those Fire earbuds separately, as well. I actually bought a few pairs because I thought they had decent sound and were reasonably comfortable. I thought they were much better than other cheap earbuds I tried. Thanks for confirming that my hearing discernment isn't too bad.
I had these. The phone was whatever, but the earbuds are surprisingly darn good. Still have and use them after all these years. I recommend getting those silicon covers they made for the Apple buds.
@@ciarangale4738 It just helps to hold them together a little better and helps against tangling, but if it's in your pocket all day with bunch of other stuff, it'll still tangle.
1:30 I remember having one of those power bricks as my personal wall adapter for years. It randomly decided to not work, but it was a good adapter at the time (very antiquated for today's standards, sadly).
@@Henry7Madsen honestly I kinda hope he doesnt go that path like LTT, it feels a lot more special with just wade you know? obviously maybe some editors with a similar humor to his but surely not much more than that.
I had a Fire tablet. It was one of the first media players I ever owned, and I loved that thing. Played RU-vid great and was great for reading books, but it had ads on the lockscreen that you couldn't turn off. Unfortunately, it fell into the bath and died a watery death. RIP.
I had one too! It fell in the shower a couple of times and got a tad too banged up to work properly (the power and volume buttons just didn't work most of the time) but it was great to read e-books tbh
Frank is literally my favorite part of your videos. Love her so much >u< makes me happy to have my own derp noodle to watch as she yawns after feeding her
@@heleakedallovertheplace it's meant to be a facial expression, and there's no issue with them using it. Getting things across in text is difficult sometimes, so I appreciate when they're used
Wade, you need a lab power supply for things like Over time battery falls in deep discharge state and with lab psu you can resurrect them. Or just solder wires directly to motherboard
Such devices as a smartphone usually have a charging ic that capable of waking battery from deep sleep. Have no idea what was wrong with the phone on video :)
I am so glad you made this video, for literally the past few weeks I was thinking about this phone and how much of a failure it was and also how no one talks about it any more. You are a wonderful humanbeing and I hope you have a wonderful night sleep :)
BJs/Costco/Sams Club are best for large things like soap, tissues, paper towels, toilet paper...Basically anything that is lightweight with a big box amazon is usually worse. Great for stuff like garbage bags and clothespins etc tho
I purchase a bunch of these back in the day. The fire phone went on clearance and for whatever reason they didn't open them up and remove the amazon year service cards. So I was buying the phones for like 40 bucks a pop. Cracking them open. Taking out the 1 year memberships, selling the phones for 35 and getting years of service for 5 bucks a pop. I only just recently stopped having prime curtesy of Fire Phones.
Like I've always said, the more money someone has the more likely they are to become detached from common sense and make stupid decisions. Love your work already btw, definitely subscribing :)
Great vid as always, glad you could get the phone functioning. I remember getting a kindle fire tablet that was pretty tough and lasted quite a bit before the charging port died. It wasn’t bad for my first “smart” device but looking back definitely weird os and ui (the apps are all on a “carousel” you scroll through left to right and they appear in the order you last used them)
yknow, if this released a few years later, it would have been perfect for Vtubers, facial tracking is super important, and having so many cameras to track movement well would have been insanely useful. after all, a solid amount of vtubers use iPhones for their tracking since the facial recognition and tracking on their selfie cams tends to work better than just a traditional webcam. so basically my thoughts seeing those cameras was "wow this could be really useful for me" and then i realized theres 0 way it wouldve ever gotten any third party app support
i remember helping people fix these things, it was almost impossible to get them to actually handle calls since most purchases came with preset plans and nobody knew who they were supposed to be referred to for replacements. Pretty sure they were just dropped and people were offered store credit at the first sign of hardware problems. I think its really funny how the fire tablets straight up thrived but then the phones were dead on arrival and there was nothing anyone could do about it
I remember a few weeks before they came out, all the tech magazines were raving about its awesome 3D feature like it's the coolest thing ever, and I was like "yeah, but what else can it do?" In the beginning, they were heavily promoted on the home page anytime you logged into Amazon, but after a short while, they were harder and harder to find until ultimately, the phone wasn't even on the promo banner of the new Kindle and Fire Tablet generations. Here in Austria, they were never available with a contract, and you also couldn't buy them unlocked on Amazon, so it was never even an option for me to buy one. But I sure noticed there was something terribly wrong with it, given it went from front page craze to absolutely no mention of it at all in a matter of only a few months... 😅
