I will admit I haven't had a chance to spend a lot of time looking over the information on this newly announced – but heavily rumored – phone from Amazon. However, the thing I'm seeing a lot of talk about is concerning Dynamic Perspective and the three dimensional aspect to the display. I will certainly be spending more time looking over this.
When it comes to Dynamic Perspective I feel that this is an interesting idea, although I don't consider amazon to be the first to try it. This is really just a more elaborate version of the parallax idea introduced in iOS 7 by Apple. The guys over at The Prompt shared similar thoughts to this on their latest Podcast. Their discussion of the phone is definitely worth listening to.
The UX with dynamic perspective is more important here than it would be for most other features and products. If it is not well designed I fear that this feature could quickly become more irritating to the end user than helpful. Thus far my friends who spend time on UI and UX design seem unimpressed.
As for the three dimensional aspect to the dynamic perspective I have been wondering why anyone would want this. Ever since the rumors of it first started rolling around the web I just have not been able to pinpoint a major reason why. I can turn and twist my phone and my head to see three dimensional images, but I cannot immediately think of any great benefit to this. I will be considering possible benefits more over the next several days but the only one that comes to mind is shopping for products. Seeing the object from a three dimensional perspective could be helpful when deciding on certain purchases. Combined with the Firefly technology this definitely seems to be what Amazon had in mind. Gruber stated in his typically succinct manner, "it seems optimized – perhaps unsurprisingly so – for making it easy to buy things on Amazon." That is the same feeling I have about this phone and it makes me wonder if Amazon even considered their customers when designing this device. Initially I cannot help but feel they spent all their time wondering how they could hock more stuff on Amazon.
It's also interesting to note that the product page on Amazon doesn't mention the word 3D once. Weird that the rumors and discussion around it make such a big deal about it but the page that actually allows users to buy it doesn't say 3D once.