I love my Amazon Fire Phone. I've now ordered an additional unlocked one for $199, which is really $100 when you factor in the free year of Prime. It's a killer deal.
The integration with Kindle, Amazon Fire Phone, and Amazon Prime Music are brilliant and well executed. I give Amazon huge kudos for thinking at least somewhat outside the box and considering how folks interact with their smartphone. The carousel-based "previews" for in-app data is a smart feature that I'd love to see both Android and iOS learn from, in fact.
I did change the setting to allow sideloading of free Amazon Fire Phone apps from day one. Many apps I've tried (in fact, most outside of Google-built ones) work perfectly or nearly perfectly. If you're willing to invest a little bit of time in figuring out how to sideload apps, the "app gap" nearly vanishes quite quickly (or at least it did for me).
All of this is in the context of being a somewhat early adopter. Stil, the Fire Phone feels a lot more complete and ready for primetime in this first iteration than I remember feeling about many of the first generation devices I've owned, and I've owned most of them (the original iPhone, the G1, the Palm Pre, even the Motorola Droid, the BlackBerry Z10, and the Lumia 710). I'm excited to see where Amazon goes with the Fire Phone, and the platform and ecosystem (Instant Video, Prime Music, Kindle Unlimited) are more than compelling enough for me to stick around for the ride.
