I am looking at this from a media consumption perspective. While Apple, Google, and Microsoft (and OEMS) try to out do each other in the spec race. Amazon has always catered to users consumer habits. From their early beginning selling books to their entrance (dominance) with digital books, Amazon has always focused on facilitating content/media/physical goods consumption. The Kindle Fire tablets have led up to this phone. This phone will succeed in facilitating users to purchase from Amazon and Amazon alone.
Apple is not facilitating the "purchase" of goods either digital or physical with one button on the iPhone. Bezos did outline the phone's specs, but the goal was to show the audience how the phone can "see" the world around itself. The phone is the first consumer product to be aware of its surroundings. It uses the data to ease purchases for the user. MY Nexus 5 makes search easy with google now, voice commands, and chrome. But this phone will make buying easy, in theory. Like I mentioned above, I am not looking at this from the perspective of the smartphone market. As in will it do well or will tech bloggers like it. But, as in will the end user find it easier to purchase goods using the physical world as intent triggers.
The iPhone is very cleverly designed to facilitate purchases in the iTunes and iOS App stores. You need to register the device with an account and credit card just to use it. If that's not a seamless consumer experience, I don't know what is.
This phone allows you to point your device to basically anything "media" and buy it. Pointing the phone at the television, identifying the actor on TV and buying some movie is a very powerful feature for people interested in consuming media...
Google is really in the same business of obtaining captive users to sell and sell to. The Nexus devices are priced cheaper than pretty much any other OEM can compete with. I really hated it when the Android Market was renamed Google Play and now shows me a ton of movies and books and magazines and stuff I don't want. I use Amazon Kindle for that and only want apps, so Google is sort of abusing their position to market higher profit goods to me I'm not interested in. Hopefully amazon is a bit more tasteful in their approach.
The addition of music streaming to Amazon Prime certainly makes a lot more sense now. I have a Nexus 5 that I keep meaning to upload my music to, but I usually end up listening to an instant mix of Google Play freebies.
