 Of course Amazon was making a smartphone. Our smartphones are our most personal devices, our most used devices, and Amazon wins when it's right there in front of you. So of course Amazon was making a smartphone. And this is it, the Fire Phone. The first time you look at it or touch it, there's really nothing remarkable about the Fire Phone. It's a black rectangle, a slab of glass, and beveled plastic. It's heavy, but not really. Big, but not really. It's just a phone. It has a 4.7 inch 720p display that's not anything special, but certainly gets the job done. It has three speakers so you'll always get stereo sound. It has a raised home button, which I weirdly like a lot, and an etched Amazon logo on the back. It has excellent performance thanks to a Snapdragon 800 processor and about a day and a half of battery life. It's all good enough without ever standing out. It's just fine. The camera, at least, is fairly straightforward and pretty good. It's 13 megapixels and takes solid sharp images in just about any situation. It's better in low light than almost any Android camera I've tested, actually. There's a nice panorama mode, plus one for taking photos you can look at, with the dynamic perspective features turned on. The only problem is the camera's slow. Slow to focus, slow to shoot, just slow. The only hint you get from looking at the Fire Phone that it might be something a little bit different is the five, count them, five camera lenses pointing out of the front bezel. They make for an ugly front of a smartphone, like exposed screws or visible seams, but they enable one of the most important features of the Fire Phone. That feature is called dynamic perspective. It uses four cameras in the four corners of the Fire Phone's face to recognize your head, its position, and its motion. And then it lets you see lots of different parts of the phone's OS in 3D. Sort of. When you look at the home screen and move your head around, you'll be looking around the icons. You can also move the phone, which responds to tilts and gestures to always be showing you more information. To open the quick settings menu and the notification window, you flick your wrist back and forth with the phone in it. You tilt it to show hidden menus or pop up more information in a map. Amazon's whole idea is to take away most of the information on any given screen and only show you what you want to see at that moment. Games are awesome with dynamic perspective, more immersive than just flat-out more fun. But with everything else, it's just a gimmick, and sometimes it's actually unhelpful. It means that the Fire Phone doesn't always show the time or battery levels. You have to tilt the phone slightly to make them appear. I don't want to do that. I want all of that as accessible as possible. All this tech is open to developers, and they may well find cool ways to use it, but really all I wanted to do was turn it off and just use the phone. The other big new feature of the Fire Phone is Firefly. It's basically an ultra powerful object recognition tool, able to scan email addresses and phone numbers and websites and deodorants and tea bags and books and movies and songs and speakers and almost anything else you put in front of the Fire Phone's camera. At a very basic level, Firefly is a shopping tool, like the ones available for lots of other devices. You're running out of soap, so you scan the bottle and four seconds later you've bought more soap. From Amazon. But you can also listen for a song and in one tap start an iHeart radio station with whatever you were hearing. It's up to developers to make this interesting, because all Firefly does is figure out what's being shown. Eventually it'll do more than just add soap to my Amazon cart. The problem is it doesn't work all that well. It got books right most of the time, always figured out what song I was listening to, but it often couldn't figure out the object at all, or got kind of close but not really. Firefly is kind of its own thing, a single app with a single purpose, but dynamic perspective invades everything about how the Fire Phone works. Its software, Fire OS, is all about three panel interfaces. In the middle, your content. On the left, menus. On the right is what Amazon calls delighters, little additive tricks that add something fun or useful to the app you're in. That concept is fine, even though it's frustrating how few third-party apps currently play along. It's the navigation that's the problem. There's no indication that those menus exist off to the sides, or when they exist, or what's in them. You just have to open an app, flick the phone back and forth a million times, and see where everything is. The Fire Phone's multitasking isn't exactly obvious either. I spent a lot of time just hitting the home button, going back and starting everything over. But even the home screen is confusing. It shows every app, book, or item you've opened in reverse chronological order. As you scroll through them, below each one is related information. Your agenda underneath calendar, recent texts underneath messages. Underneath most of them though is just more stuff to buy. You have a to-do list app? Here are five more! Some things scroll left to right, some up and down, and there's an app drawer hidden underneath the row of icons at the bottom. There's a lot going on here, and once you understand the paradigm, it's even sort of clever. But it's a million miles from obvious or intuitive. The only thing consistently straightforward about the Fire Phone is how easy it is to get things from Amazon. Buying, renting, streaming, anything from Amazon is easy. But that's not what a smartphone is for. A smartphone is for a lot of things. Shopping, definitely among them. But it's also for getting work done, for relaxing, for communicating. And since Amazon doesn't have the Play Store, it's missing a huge number of Android apps, including all of Google's. And everything from the email client, to the calendar app, to maps suffers as a result. Amazon's only going to win if it gets developers on board with its most unique features. And when it can't even compete on number of apps, it's hard to see them really working to develop for one phone on one carrier from Amazon. So the Fire Phone costs $199 with a two-year contract, and it's available from AT&T. It's full of big ideas, a couple of them huge and full of potential that will probably never be realized. In a few months or years, things like Dynamic Perspective and Firefly could go from cool gimmicks to actually important features. Mayday, the super simple one-touch support system, is really awesome as well, and you'll need it in order to figure out how to use the Fire Phone. But in an effort to make something different and new and innovative, Amazon kind of forgot to make a good smartphone. A good smartphone should be fast and efficient, entirely without complications. The Fire Phone tries to be fun and delightful, but too often it's just complicated.