Amazon’s first smartphone, the Fire Phone, looks like an amazing piece of hardware. You'll want to play around with it the first chance you get.
A key part of this allure are the four cameras tucked into the front corners of the phone's 4.7-inch screen. They're not for taking Brady Bunch selfies, but they can pull off some fancy "Dynamic Perspective" tricks. Using the camera’s face-tracking input, you can look around onscreen objects, even peer behind them. It's not about popping-out-of-the-screen 3-D, but about infusing a sense of depth and realism into a bunch of flat pixels. Your phone becomes a little diorama box, with stunning effects for 3-D maps, games, and homescreen wallpaper.
That dynamic perspective is also meant to make using the Fire Phone with one hand a lot easier. You can tilt the phone to scroll through news articles or books, as well as navigate through screens.
The other cameras will also be put to use for the phone's Firefly feature, basically an everything-scanner. By launching the Firefly app with a dedicated button and pointing the phone's back camera at anything---book covers, cans of soup, video game boxes, phone numbers, restaurant signs, UPC codes, QR codes---you can create a queue of things to identify, save on the device, or buy on Amazon. It also has Shazam-like features to identify songs to buy or find on streaming services, and even pinpoint scenes in movies or TV shows based on the audio track.
>Using the camera’s face-tracking input, you can look around onscreen objects, even peer behind them.
These innovative features augmented by Amazon's hardware development and services aren't just window dressing. As a plain old phone, Amazon’s first offering looks to be a very good one. It has a 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 system-on-a-chip at its heart with 2GB RAM, just like other previous generation Android phones out there. It also has a 2,400 mAh battery that Amazon says should last "all day," and a 13-megapixel main camera with optical stabilization and an F2.0 lens. Like Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets, the Fire Phone's speakers offer Dolby virtual surround sound and what the company describes as tangle-free earbuds. The Fire Phone comes with free unlimited storage on Amazon Cloud Drive, and for a limited time 1,000 Amazon Coins (a $10 value) for apps, games, and in-app purchases.
The bigger question is whether the display, connectivity, camera, and other features---all backed by Amazon’s ability to deliver anything from movies and music to groceries and gadgets via the device---can make a dent in the iPhone/Android-dominated mobile market. But wait, isn’t this an Android phone?
Sort of. The Amazon phone runs Android, but it does it in the same way the company’s Kindle Fire tablets do. Which is to say it’s a heavily modified version of the mobile OS. The major difference is that Amazon’s new phone, like its tablets, won’t run every Android app.
Amazon offers its approved collection of apps via its own Amazon Appstore; you can’t just fire up Google Play and go to town. One stat speaks to that: There are 240,000 apps in Amazon’s Appstore, while iOS and Android each have about five times as many offerings. You’ll get most of the big-name games, social-networking apps, video apps, and music services you’re looking for, but not all of them. SnapChat and YouTube are notable omissions, for example. According to Dave Limp, senior vice president of of Amazon devices, Instagram will be available in time for launch, as will Uber.
Like every other piece of the company’s hardware, this is a phone built to be a pocketable Amazon pop-up store. The phone, like Amazon’s e-readers, tablets, and new set-top box, are meant as a way to mainline Amazon’s deep coffers of content. Amazon Prime, the company’s $99-a-year pass to two-day shipping, streaming videos, and now streaming music, is offered free with the phone for a full year to get you hooked.
Amazon says that plenty of people have gotten hooked in the past year, and CEO Jeff Bezos attributes Amazon Prime's growth to the company's entry-point hardware: "Tens of millions of Kindle owners" and "tens of millions of Kindle Fire owners" tapping into Amazon Prime services.
According to Bezos, that's dozens of millions of people who now trust Amazon. He drilled home the idea that Amazon leads a slew of consumer brand-trust surveys in today's announcement.
Bulking up the Amazon Appstore is another big reason this phone exists. Even though its out-of-box features look incredible, the phone's success may hinge on the creativity of third-party developers. Amazon is certainly hoping that the unique opportunities presented by its new hardware will inspire developers. There’s simply nothing like it to develop for out there: The eye-tracking, the gesture controls, the way onscreen objects take on a new viewable dimension. Amazon says that SDKs for both Firefly and Dynamic Perspective are now available.
In the best case scenario, this phone spurs a wave of apps that make good use of 3-D effects and hands-free navigation. If it’s a true development breakthrough and not just a gimmick, people will want those apps. And they’ll need this phone to run them (for the time being, at least). In the worst case scenario, people will think this phone sounds kinda cool, play with it for a few minutes in an AT&T store, and go back to buying the iPhones and Galaxys they always have.
Pricing for the Fire Phone will be $200 for the 32GB version and $300 for the 64GB one. Both of those are with two-year contracts from AT&T, who will be the only carrier offering the phone. It goes on sale July 25th, and for those who pre-order Amazon is offering a deal that gives Prime and non-Prime users either an extra year of membership or a one-year complimentary one, respectively.
