Today Amazon unveiled their first smartphone. It’s called the Fire Phone, another branch off of Amazon’s Fire branding from their tablets and TV box.
The Fire Phone is sort of like a mini Kindle Fire tablet in some ways, but it brings a lot more features to the table, both hardware and software, and even includes a few new reading features.
As expected, the device is heavily integrated with Amazon’s ecosystem for video, music, ebooks, and apps. Plus it comes with a free year of Amazon Prime, for a limited time.
Amazon didn’t skimp on the hardware of their first phone; it has a nice healthy spec sheet. It’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 2.2GHz quad-core processor, with 2GB of RAM. It has a high-end 13MP rear camera with optical image stabilization and LED flash. The screen is a 4.7-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1280 x 720 (315 ppi), and as expected the device features a 3D display.
Amazon calls it “Dynamic Perspective”. The phone can track your eye movements and adjust the screen images accordingly.
Other features include Gorilla Glass 3, a rubber frame, aluminum buttons, dual stereo speakers with Dolby Digital Plus virtual surround sound, 590 nits screen brightness, tilting sensors, and it comes with premium earbuds with stay-flat cables.
Battery life is rated at up to 22 hours for talking, and up to 11 hours for watching video.
Amazon has added some nifty software features to the Kindle Phone. They introduced this thing called Firefly. It’s a recognition program that can recognize over a hundred million different objects, including music, TV, art, bar codes, items from the store, etc. Mayday is also onboard for instant customer support.
There’s a new scrolling feature for reading Kindle ebooks. You can set auto scroll or use the device’s tilt sensor to turn pages. This works for scrolling with the web browser too.
The Kindle Phone is exclusive to AT&T for coverage. The device costs $199 for 32GB, and $299 for 64GB. Without a service plan it costs a wallet-emptying $649. The Fire Phone is available for pre-order at Amazon and will be released on July 25th.
With these high end specs, it will totally a worthy challenge for the developers and hackers to break free the amazon eco system.
Maybe its me but I was just sort of “meh” about the phone. It has some cool features but not enough of a draw for me to trade in my S4 anytime soon. I think it is a good phone if you are completely tied into the Amazon eco system. I am not so this is just not a big deal to me.
Do you think that in the future we’ll be able to use this new scrolling feature for reading ebooks also on a Kindle eReader ?
Because of the way E Ink works, I doubt we’ll ever see it on an E Ink Kindle. But it might get ported to the Kindle Fire tablets eventually.
Smartphone market is being flooded with new phones every day. And I must say the “Firefly” idea is a great innovation to generate sales.