David Pierce of The Verge reviewed Amazon’s Fire Phone:

You’re entirely reliant on gestures and flicks of the phone to access these menus. Most apps have no indicators or helpful icons; you just have to open every app and twist the phone around like a lunatic to find things. You can’t even see the time without tilting your phone just so. An errant buzz is your only indication that you have a notification, prompting you to cock your wrist or swipe down from the top bezel to open the notification windowshade. None of this is explained, none of it is intuitive. Dynamic Perspective makes everything look cleaner, but makes actually using your phone a lot harder. I don’t need my phone to be clever, or spartan. I need it to be obvious. The Fire Phone is anything but.

Watching David flick the phone to the left and right to do basic UI things like “show a menu” was fucking painful. Did any decent UX designer even try and use this phone prior to release? This reeks of someone high-up having a single-minded obsession with a bad idea and using their position to drive that idea to market regardless of how many people told them not to.

At least the people (who I have to assume exist) that said “no, no, dear God, no this is stupid, please stop” get the dark satisfaction of watching this thing crash and burn in a marketplace full of much better phones with much better ideas.