When Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, introduced the phone in Seattle to the news media and a few of those 60,000 avid members of the public, he said the Fire team had been guided by these questions: “How would the phone be different? Can we build a better phone for our most-engaged customers? Can we build a better phone for Amazon Prime members?”

One way the phone was different was with its Dynamic Perspective feature, which enhanced maps, shopping and games. Firefly, which identified products and made it easy to order them from Amazon, was another innovation.

But in reviews on Amazon’s site, customers said the parts that were different were not necessarily good, and the parts that were good — call clarity, for one thing — were not enough to outweigh things like a short battery life and a tendency to overheat. And there were other issues: “If you use this phone, you are inviting Amazon to know all the details of your life.”

A quarter of the reviewers of the Fire gave it one star, which Amazon translates as “I hate it.”

Other reviewers sounded a theme not of anger but of sadness.

“I wanted to love my Fire phone. I really love Amazon,” began the review voted the most helpful by other shoppers. But the love quickly soured as the customer found the phone clumsy and difficult to use. She wrote that she had replaced her Fire with a Google Nexus and “could not be more happy.”

Amazon said on Monday that earlier buyers should contact customer service to apply for a refund. An AT&T spokesman said that it had a 14-day return policy, meaning that the handful of customers who bought directly from the carrier in the first month were out of luck.

Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research was skeptical of the phone’s chances from the beginning, saying that if it sold more than a few hundred thousand units in the first year it would be a success.