Time for a Change

What I Will Miss Most About the Fire Phone

Two days ago I finally did it.

Sitting in our Ford Focus in the condo parking garage, talking on the car speakers to an AT&T Wireless tech named Audi, I upgraded (if that's the word) from my Amazon Fire Phone to an iPhone Six Plus, gold. It arrived yesterday in a little FedEx box that I waited to open until after this week's podcast was up late last night.

I question whether "upgrade" is the correct word for this change, because last night as I activated my cell number on the iPhone I was acutely aware of what I am going to miss most about Fire. As homage to what the tech and finance world consider Bezos's Folly, I want to list them here:

1. Mayday. There will be no 24/7 live video support on iPhone, with the tech able to see and control my screen.

2. Dynamic Perspective. Useless as it was to get practical things done, I will miss the dazzling 3D effects of the Fire's lock screen. My favorite was the gold fountain pen. You could look behind it by moving your head.

3. Swiping the keyboard to enter text. Is there a way to do that on iPhone? Maybe. If it were a Fire, I'd tap the Mayday button and find out in less than a Seattle minute.

4. Firefly. One-button insight into things in the real world, delivered by a swarm of little bright lights.

So you won't find me bashing the Fire Phone, even though I decided to return to iPhone two days ago in the garage. A host of reasons went into the decision, as indicated by the previous 10 chapters of this serial. In the end, an AT&T Wireless tech named Audi laid out a path forward that simply made sense. When AT&T asked me to rate Audi on a 1 to 10 scale, I entered 20.

I had called AT&T from the car to find out what the penalty was going to be for breaking my two-year Fire contract. Before talking with Audi, I had planned to cancel the contract and leave AT&T for Verizon, which has better cell coverage in a place we sometimes drive to, Wyoming. I had also planned to buy an unlocked iPhone, so that I wouldn't be confined by another two-year contract.

Audi looked up my account and told me the penalty for early termination of the contract would be $250. She then suggested that I stay with AT&T and upgrade to an iPhone using AT&T Next.

I am not convinced that I understand all the ins and outs of Next, but Audi was able to set it up so that my AT&T bill will decrease by $10 a month. I paid about $100 up front in taxes and fees, and I keep the Fire Phone, which I can unlock for whatever use. She also shipped the iPhone 6+ to me overnight at no extra charge. I am buying the iPhone 6+ in installments, no doubt with a hefty interest rate built in. But any time I want to upgrade again, I won't pay a penalty, just a fee to switch to a new phone. Or I can buy out the installment contract, keep the phone, and sell it on eBay.

Why I like this path is that I expect Team Bezos to introduce a bonfire-sized phone in September. I hope to attend the press conference and will certainly give the next version of Fire a try. I hope Fire 2 will give us the ability to do ordinary things, like banking and buying coffee.

Meanwhile, I am more than content with this thin, jumbo sized gold slab of Apple luxury. The speaker quality is much better than the Fire's--I realized that as I listened to last night's episode of the Kindle Chronicles. Tomorrow I will use the iPhone to buy a coffee at the Writer's Square Starbucks, and I'm sure the app will work. My bank's iOS app works flawlessly.

Plus there's Meerkat!

My return to iPhone actually followed a one-two punch delivered by Audi and Meerkat, the buzzwonderful new frictionless video streaming app introduced the week before South by Southwest. Meerkat is not even available on Android yet, nevermind the Fire's modified Android platform.

I helped spread the Meerkat enthusiasm at South By--asking everyone and telling everyone about it. Back home here in Denver I immediately installed Meerkat on my iPad mini. I filmed a paint-dryingly dull video of traffic out the window and was amazed when a few people tuned in. Last night my friend Garrett Riley had the brilliant idea of my Meerkatting preparation of the podcast.

I set the mini beside me at the desk, and by the end of the livestream about 120 viewers had tuned in. As I worked on the script in Evernote and recorded and edited the voiceover in LogicPro, I saw 30 to 40 little circles of faces along the top of the Meerkat window. Garrett advised me in a tweet to "pretend we're not here," which was good advice.

My podcast creation, which I have nicknamed Podcast Mountain, a peak that I have climbed every week, usually on Friday, for more than six years, begins with wandering in the foothills. I check Mashable and BuzzFeed. (I've given up Huffington Post, The New York Times, and The Washington Post for Lent.) I clean up old email in the InBox. I cut my fingernails. That's why, unless I have a commitment like guests coming for dinner, I seldom reach the top of Podcast Mountain until midnight or sometimes later.

Not last night. With an audience of Meerkatters on my desk, I stuck to business and finished by 10 p.m.

I knew as soon as the Meerkat wave crested in Austin that I would want a phone that could take advantage of it. So that was the final straw that brought me here tonight, getting to know my shiny new iPhone 6+.

To return to what I will miss about the Fire, here is what happened just now when I called AppleCare for help syncing up text messaging between my MacBook Air and the phone: I waited five minutes on hold to connect with a dispatcher who decided where to send my call. I then waited another five minutes to talk with John, who solved my problem quickly and professionally. By comparison, it would have taken under a minute for a Mayday tech to appear on the phone and solve the problem.

I asked John what hours I will be able to reach the iPhone call centers. Between 8 a.m. and 11 p.m. seven days a week, local time, he said. I replied that's pretty good but not as good as Amazon's 24/7 service. "Let me check with my supervisor to see if we have a 24/7 number," John said. After a couple of minutes he said the answer is no, but that overlapping coverage of call centers in different parts of the country means that there are just a few gaps "in the wee hours of the morning."

I then asked John if AppleCare techs can see and control my iPhone the way Mayday reps can control a Fire. "We can do that on a computer, and we're working on it for the iOS devices," he said. That's good, and it makes me think Cupertino is feeling the heat from Amazon's groundbreaking tech support for Fire phone and tablets. I didn't want to press John too hard, so I told him I'm glad to be back on iPhone, for its beauty and power, even if the tech support isn't quite what I'm used to from Amazon.

John must have thought I had hung up sooner than I did. Just before I signed off I heard him utter the sound someone makes when it's really cold outside. "Brrrrrr!" I heard him say. He did a good job helping out this returning iPhone customer.

I can imagine his returning to the supervisor with a question that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid asked each other when they were being pursued by a mysterious posse organized by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. "Who are those guys?" the train robbers wondered in the classic 1969 film starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman. As in, "Who are these guys from Seattle leading customers to expect 24/7 video chat and screen control within minutes?"

I don't think Bezos's posse has given up the chase. When they return, probably in the fall with even more horsepower, I will be ready to join them again and see what's around the bend.