Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos believes there is room in the market for something different. Even with the dominant leads that Apple and Samsung hold, Bezos told The Associated Press in an interview, “it’s still early” in the wireless device business.
The phone’s most significant feature, called “Firefly,” employs audio and object recognition technology to identify products and present the user with ways to purchase the items through Amazon. Users can simply snap a photo of a book, for instance, and Firefly will offer up its title and author, give more information about it and provide ways to buy it through Amazon with a single click.
“We wanted to make a device that’s great for one person,” Bezos said. “It’s like a certain person likes chocolate and another person likes vanilla. The customer can choose.”
Another feature, called “dynamic perspective,” uses four infrared, front-facing cameras that tell the phone where the user’s face and eyes are located. The feature adjusts the user interface so that tilting the screen relative to the viewer’s face can toggle through screens, scroll through websites, make online video game characters fly up or down, and render buildings and other custom-made art in 3-D.
The feature that lets the new Amazon Fire Phone send a movie or TV show wirelessly to a compatible television while the the phone serves as a “second screen” to display information about actors, locations, and scenes is shown.
Amazon is using Gorilla Glass 3 here with a rubber frame. The buttons are indeed aluminum though. It’s also featuring a 4.7-inch IPS LCD display, which does 590 nits of brightness, so it gets pretty bright which is good. As far as the processor goes it’s running the Snapdragon 800 with an Adreno 330 GPU and has 2GB of RAM. On the back we’ve got a 13MP camera with f/2.0 aperture. The best part of the camera is that the Fire Phone includes unlimited photo storage in Amazon’s cloud storage. There’s also dual-stereo speakers on the bottom of the Fire Phone, which should give us a good sound experience.
The entry-level Fire phone, introduced Wednesday, costs $199 with a two-year AT&T contract, which places it at the high end of smartphone pricing. But the phone comes with 32 gigabytes of memory, double the standard 16 GB. It also comes with 12 months of Amazon Prime, the company’s free shipping, video, music and book subscription plan, which normally costs $99 a year.
