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Re/wind: Amazon Goes Mobile, Legere Sounds Off

amazon fire phone feature crop

In case you missed some of the headlines this past week, here’s the news that powered Re/code and the week in tech:

  1. Amazon unveiled its smartphone this week, announcing an exclusive partnership with AT&T and a price tag comparable to to the iPhone’s. While the phone has some neat new features, the big thing about it is how easy the Amazon phone makes it to … buy Amazon products. Re/code’s Walt Mossberg has more on what that could mean for Amazon down the road.
  2. BlackBerry surprised just about everyone with news that it turned a profit this past quarter. It also announced a deal with Amazon to use that company’s Appstore on BlackBerry 10 devices. Party like it’s 2011, I guess?
  3. Thelma & Louise: Perhaps the classic selfie.
  4. Google’s Nest purchased the home-monitoring startup Dropcam for $555 million, making Nest one step closer to turning your home into a giant app. Also, the previously defective smoke detector that Nest pulled from shelves last month is now back on the market, and for $30 cheaper.
  5. T-Mobile CEO John Legere told a crowd on Wednesday night that other carriers were “raping” their customers with data charges. He subsequently apologized in a tweet. But T-Mobile isn’t apologizing for its continued pressure on the rest of the industry. In other T-Mobile news on Wednesday, the company announced a free weeklong iPhone test drive, an ambitious new data-free music plan, and partnership with the streaming service Rhapsody.
  6. More and more full-length videos from the Code Conference became available in the website’s video section this week; here's the session with Intel CEO Brian Krzanich talking about his company’s wearables gambit, and Nest CEO Tony Fadell outlining his vision for the future of technology in the home.
  7. Practice Fusion, a provider of online electronic health records, named its new CFO this week — Robert Park, previously of Chegg — indicating that it plans to go public soon.
  8. Google said it plans to use its Project Loon to make Internet available in rural areas via balloons next year. No word yet on what the balloons think.
  9. If you can’t buy Snapchat, copy ’em! At least that’s what Facebook’s strategy appears to be with its latest app, Slingshot.
  10. The Supreme Court has announced that it plans to consider whether violent threats made on Facebook constitute a criminal act. Comment sections everywhere await the decision with bated breath.