Finally Amazon enters the smartphone market with Fire Phone – coupled with innovative ideas like Firefly, Dynamic Perspective, X-Ray and Mayday.
Before talking about the hardware, let’s see what innovative technology Amazon has packed in this smartphone. The first ones is the Dynamic Perspective – a custom-designed sensor system on the device that responds to how you hold, view, and move your phone. It allow you to tilt, auto-scroll, swivel, and peek to navigate menus and access shortcuts with one hand. It’s achieved by the four sensors on each corner of the device that are accompanied by infrared LEDs to work even in pitch darkness. It redraws 3D images at 60 frames per second providing crisp and sharp images every time in every angle.
Next is the Firefly technology that’s similar to Google Goggles, Shazam and others but all combined to a single package. It uses the camera to quickly identify printed web and email addresses, phone numbers, QR and bar codes, plus over 100 million items, including movies, TV episodes, songs, and products by simply press and hold the dedicated Firefly button to discover useful information and of-course buy it from Amazon. It uses X-Ray, powered by IMDb, to identify movies and TV shows that offers information on actors, plot details, episode details and related content. Amazon has released SDK for the same and third-party app developers can build apps that recognize real world objects.
Taking the customer support to the next level, Amazon is offering free live video, on-device technical support with Mayday. With a dedicated Mayday button customers can seek help of technical support 24×7 and 365 day. Interestingly the tech support can walk-through any feature by drawing on your mobile screen remotely.
Now coming to the hardware part the Amazon Fire Phone is designed with aluminum buttons, chamfered edges and injection-molded connectors for premium look and feel. It got a 4.7 inch HD LCD display with a pixel density of 315 ppi. With 590nots of brightness, one can easily use the device even in direct sunlight. The device is powered with 2.2GHz Quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor coupled with 2GB RAM and Adreno 330 GPU. It got a 13 megapixel back camera with fast five-element wide aperture f/2.0 lens and optical image stabilization. Now that you will be taking lots of pictures using it, Amazon is offering free unlimited cloud storage for all photos taken in full resolution. In addition it also got a 2.1 megapixel front-facing camera.
On the storage side Fire Phone comes with 32GB or 64GB internal storage variant, that can’t be expanded further. The device carries dual stereo speakers with Dolby Digital Plus audio processing that offers immersive audio experience. On the connectivity side the device supports global 4G LTE coverage with support for nine bands along with 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0 and NFC. On the software side the Fire Phone runs on a heavily modded Android variant – the Fire OS 3.5.0 and doesn’t come with Google Mobile Services suite.
- 4.7 inch IPS LCD HD display with Gorilla Glass
- 2.2GHz Quad-core Snapdragon 800 CPU, with Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB of RAM
- Fire OS 3.5.0
- 32/64GB storage
- 13MP rear camera with OIS and 2.1 MP front-facing camera
- Dynamic Perspective sensor system with invisible infrared illumination
- Free cloud storage for all Amazon content, and photos
- Dual stereo speakers with Dolby Digital Plus audio processing
- Nine band 4G LTE, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0, NFC
- 2400mAh Battery
Amazon Fire Phone currently only available in US exclusively on AT&T starting from $199 (Rs 12,000) for a two-year contract on the 32GB version. We can never expect the smartphone to land on India, as most of the highlighted features on the device will not work in India.
Source – Amazon Fire Phone