Amazon is rolling out its biggest Amazon Fire Phone update to date in hopes of attracting a new market and getting some people to take one of the millions of Fire Phone units gathering dust on its warehouse shelves.
The new software will become available via an over-the-air update pushed by Amazon to the few Fire Phone users out there. It will include some of the best new features whose absence contributed to the public's cold reception of Amazon's newest device, despite being marketed as a "breakthrough" in smartphone technology and touting a cool but gimmicky head-tracking feature that mimicked a 3D screen.
The new features include the ability to translate text in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish and identify famous artwork in pictures using Amazon's database of more than 2,000 pieces of art. Users will also have the ability to take their Best Shot, a feature that lets them choose among which three versions of one photo to retain.
Amazon has also added several new keyboard languages, the ability to disable SMS and MMS character counts and a feature that allows users to block unwanted phone numbers. Users can also now edit documents using the WPS Office app, which will come preloaded with the new update.
Some other features that many users have expected but did not see in the first software version of the Fire Phone include the ability to add custom ringtones, control music directly from the lock screen, sync calendars across Fire OS devices and connect to a virtual private network (VPN) using the phone's native IPSec/L2TP VPN client. Kindle readers will also now have the ability to read continuously on their Fire Phone without having to touch the screen using a new feature called Auto-Scroll.
Lastly, Amazon added "dozens" of system updates to improve battery life and "hundreds" of bug fixes.
In its quarterly earnings call in October, Amazon announced that it had to take a $170 million charge relating to "inventory evaluation and supplier commitment costs" for the Fire Phone after it failed to capture the imagination of users who prefer the ecosystem of Apple's iPhones or phones running on Google's Android. Just two months after it was released in June, the $649 Fire Phone, which is carried only AT&T, was relegated to the sales bin with its price plummeting down to $0.99 on contract. Currently, the Fire Phone is available for free on a contract with AT&T or $449 for the unlocked version.
Earlier this year, Amazon senior vice president of devices David Limp admitted that Amazon blundered its way with the phone's pricing by attempting to put it the same level as iPhones and other high-end Android phones.
"We didn't get the price right," said Limp at the time. "I think people come to expect a great value, and we sort of mismatched expectations. We thought we had it right. But we're also willing to say 'we missed.' And so we corrected."
