At a special event in Seattle Wednesday, Amazon finally took the wraps off of its long-awaited smartphone, dubbed the Fire Phone.
The consumer-centric device will be sold exclusively with an AT&T contract starting at $199.99. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos highlighted two marquee features of the Fire Phone. The first is a genuine game-changer, while the second could be little more than a gimmick -- albeit a nifty one.
"Firefly," the first feature, uses the phone's rear-facing camera to recognize products in the real world. Bezos told the gathered media and VIPs that his Fire Phone can recognize any product the camera is pointed at, and he gave on-site demonstrations of it recognizing text, a book, a DVD, a game, a QR code, a URL, even a jar of Nutella.
Firefly also can recognize music that's playing, TV episodes all the way down to individual scenes, and more. It keeps a complete history of everything you scan, and offers you a one-tap purchase option to instantly buy any item from Amazon. Bezos boasted that "Firefly recognizes 100 million different items." Impressively, it can even recognize and read characters amid glare or motion blur. Firefly is accessed via a dedicated physical button on the side of the device, and reportedly does its job impressively fast.
The phone's other major feature is its much-speculated 3D visuals, called "Dynamic Perspective." The feature adds a depth effect to the phone's imagery; those who saw the device firsthand describe it as "very different than parallax effects" such as those seen in Apple's iOS.
Yes, you can tilt the phone to get different perspectives, but the effect goes much deeper thanks to head-tracking cameras on the phone's front. These special cameras feature 120-degree fields of view, which allows the Fire Phone to know where your head is at all times. Only two cameras are needed for head tracking, but Amazon gave the device four so you don't have to worry about accidentally covering one up. The phone uses the two cameras with the best perspective at all times. The cameras even have infrared lights attached so they can track you in total darkness.
The idea behind Dynamic Perspective is to give you greater insight into what you're looking at, similar to the way you might tilt your head or move around an object in the real world. Demos were shown showing dynamic lock screens, maps, and digital storefronts.
The Fire Phone's main specs are as follows:
- Gorilla Glass 3 touchscreen
- 4.7-inch IPS LCD HD display
- Quad-core 2.5 GHz CPU
- Adreno 330 GPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 32 GB or 64 GB storage
- Rubber frame
Main, rear camera: 13 MP with f/2.0 five-element lens, optical image stabilization, and dedicated shutter button
Its UI will be very familiar to Kindle Fire owners, and of course it has access to Amazon's digital library of apps, games, music, books, and movies. Other features include earbud-style magnetic headphones with specially made cords that won't tangle, all the perks of Amazon Prime (free Prime Video, Prime Music,and ebook lending), Amazon's MayDay instant video chat service for customer support, and in a particularly nice touch, unlimited photo storage in Amazon's cloud. It also works as a remote control / second screen for Amazon Fire TV.
Amazon's presentation framed the Fire Phone as not a workhorse device designed with professionals or power users in mind. Instead, Amazon emphasized it as a device designed specifically for modern consumers, created to make shopping and mobile computing easy and fun.
Preorders have begun, with Amazon expecting to ship Fire Phones on July 25. AT&T is the Fire Phone's exclusive carrier, offering the 32-GB phone with a standard two-year contract for $199, or as part of the AT&T Next program for $27 a month with zero down and no activations.
A 64-GB phone is also available for $299 or $31 a month on Next. For a limited time, Amazon is offering 12 months of Amazon Prime to Fire Phone buyers; existing Prime customers will get 12 months added to their existing plan.
