The pseudo-3D user interface and heavily customized operating system of Amazon’s first smartphone, the Fire Phone, do set it apart from the host of Android clones. However, the handset did not break radical new ground, in technology or pricing. Indeed, there was a clear backward step in launching it as an AT&T exclusive, seven years after Apple did the same and in an age when those carrier deals seem distinctly pass’. The deal would have been justified if accompanied by some innovative service pricing, which T-Mobile might have enabled, but none appeared, leaving Amazon’s usually innovative content-driven model shackled to a very conservative operator. But there was another way in which the launch was retro ‘ in its echoes of…