Amazon has unveiled its much-anticipated smartphone known as Amazon Fire equipped with many first of its kind innovations. The Fire smartphone comes with Dynamic Perspective and Firefly, two new breakthrough technologies that allow you to see and interact with the world through a whole new lens. Besides these new features, the Fire phone encompasses Amazon’s other features such as its vast content ecosystem, Mayday button, ASAP, X-Ray, free unlimited photo storage etc.
Amazon Fire has a 4.7-inch LCD HD display with 1280 x 720 resolution at 315 pp. This display has 3D capabilities, and comes with Gorilla Glass 3 protection. This phone is driven by a 2.2GHz quad-core processor with Adreno 330 graphics coupled with 2GB of RAM, and 32GB/64GB variants of internal storage. For capturing images, the Fire is equipped with a 13MP rear-facing camera with backside illumination, LED flash, 5-element f/2.0 lens and Optical Image Stabilization (OIS). Fire also includes a 2.1MP front-facing camera. Both front and rear-facing camera can record 1080p HD videos. It is packed with a 2400mAh, which is claimed to delive talk time of up to 22 hours; standby time of up to 285 hours and video playback of up to 11 hours.
THe FIre has dual stereo speakers with Dolby Digital Plus. For connectivity, it supports 4G LTE, Wi-Fi, NFC, and Bluetooth 3.0.
This phone runs on Fire OS 3.5.0. Like Amazon’s Kindle tablets, the Fire will also run a highly modified version of Google’s Android system. The apps would be available through Amazon’s own app store and currently it has more than 240,000 apps, but comparatively less than Android and Apple stores have so far.
Some of the Salient Features of Amazon Fire:
Dynamic Perspective uses four ultra-low power specialized cameras and four infrared LEDs built into the front face of Fire and its features include Auto-scroll, tilt, swivel and peek for quicker and easier navigation. With auto-scroll, one can read a long web page or a book without ever having to touch the screen; tilt in Amazon Music shows song lyrics; swivel instantly reveals quick actions; peek in Maps shows layered information like Yelp ratings and reviews. Dynamic Perspective enables a new class of apps and games that are more immersive, and make it quicker and easier for the user to access information.
On the other hand, Firefly combines Amazon’s deep catalog of physical and digital content with multiple image, text and audio recognition technologies to quickly identify web and email addresses, phone numbers, QR and bar codes, plus over 100 million items, including movies, TV episodes, songs, and products. You are required to press and hold the dedicated Firefly button to discover helpful information and take action in seconds.
Firefly recognizes 245,000 movies and TV episodes, and 160 live TV channels, 35 million song available on Amazon Store, and uses IMDb for X-Ray to show actors, plot synopses, and related content. You can add titles to Watch List or download and start watching them immediately. To encourage customers to purchase more and more products from Amazon.com, Firefly feature on the Fire phone also accesses 70 million products, including household items, books, DVDs, CDs, video games etc. for ordering them.
The Amazon Fire Phone also incorporates features found in the latest Amazon Kindle devices such as X-Ray for supplemental content and Mayday for live tech support. It also has ASAP (Advanced Streaming and Prediction) feature, which predicts which movies and TV episodes you’ll want to watch and prepares them for instant playback before you even hit play.
Amazon is offering unlimited free storage on its Cloud Drive service and as an introductory offer, the Fire phone comes with 12 months of free Prime membership, which is normally $99 a year. This phone will start shipping on July 25 and is available exclusively on AT&T for $199 – 32GB version- with a two-year contract at $27.09 a month and 64GB for $299 with a two-year contract at $31.25/month.
Amazon Fire smartphone will compete with Apple’s iPhones which have a large base of users and Samsung’s Android smartphones. Amazon has been a little bit late to announce its smartphone, but the focus of Amazon is to make it rich with content and lure the cusomers to buy more products through its smartphone. Amazon wants to replicate the success of its Kindle devices by introducing the Fire phone and their are good chances of it becoming successful because of its various innovative and contents enriched features.
