The smartphone market is full of handsets offered by various manufacturers. Now Amazon is also testing the waters of the smartphone industry with the launch of its first smartphone, Amazon Fire.
With the latest Amazon smartphone the company will have hope to give stiff competition to other smartphones such as the iPhone 5s and the Samsung Galaxy S5. Let's see how the latest Amazon Fire stacks up against the iPhone 5s and the Galaxy S5.
Many of the smartphone enthusiasts are looking to buy a smartphone with a big screen. The latest Amazon Fire sports a 4.7-inch IPS LCD screen, which packs in a screen resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels. The iPhone 5s includes a 4-inch IPS LCD screen with a display resolution of 640 x 1136 pixels. Stealing the show in this category is the Galaxy S5, which has the biggest screen size at 5.1-inch and packs in 1080 x 1920 pixels.
A powerful Snapdragon 800 processor clocked at 2.2GHz powers the Amazon Fire. An Apple custom built A7 processor powers the iPhone 5s and a powerful Snapdragon 801 processor clocked at 2.5GHz fuels the Galaxy S5.
The Amazon Fire includes a 2,400 mAh battery that offers 22 hours of talk time and around 10 days standby time. The Galaxy S5 has a 2,800 mAh battery that provides up to 21 hours of talk time and 20 days of standby time. The battery capacity of the iPhone 5s is not known but Apple claims that iPhone 5s offers usage time of up to 10 hours, which is slightly less than the Amazon Fire, and 10 days of standby time. Similar to the iPhone 5s, the Amazon Fire also does not offer a user replaceable battery. However, the Galaxy S5 battery can be replaced by its users.
The Amazon Fire is equipped with a 13-megapixel full HD video recording rear-facing camera and a 2.1-megapixel front-facing shooter to satiate all your selfie needs. The Galaxy S5 sports a 16-megapixel 4K HD video recording rear-facing and a 2.1 megapixel front camera. When compared to the Amazon Fire and the Galaxy S5, the iPhone 5s has an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 1.2-pixel front-facing camera.
Taking pictures listening and watching to media files can take up a lot of storage. With growing media storage needs, memory capacity has become an important criteria for customers when choosing a handset.
The new Amazon Fire will be available in 32GB and 64GB on-board storage options. The iPhone 5s is available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB storage options and the Galaxy S5 with 16GB and 32GB storage capacities. However, an important aspect is the use of an external memory. Unfortunately, like the iPhone 5s, the Amazon Fire does not give the option to expand the memory. However, Galaxy S5 users have the option to expand the memory to up to 128GB using a microSD card.
While the iPhone 5s and the Galaxy S5 is available via all top four carriers in the U.S., the Amazon Fire is exclusive to AT&T. Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile customers will not be able to buy the Amazon Fire from their carriers until the company decides to launch the handset for other mobile network operators as well.
Many smartphones are available in an array of colors to entice more and more handset enthusiasts. Customers buy a smartphone to best suit their individual personality. Samsung offers four colors for the Galaxy S5: black, white, blue and copper. Apple, which previously provided just black and white options for its iPhones, has also introduced a new gold color for the iPhone 5s. However, Amazon Fire customers will have to stay content with one color option - black.
The Amazon Fire is slightly smaller than the Galaxy S5 but weighs 5.64 (160 grams), making it slightly heavier than the latter which weighs 5.11 ounces (145 grams). Being the smallest, the iPhone 5s weighs only 3.95 ounces (112 grams).
Amazon confirmed that it will extend the Mayday feature, which allows live video chat with an Amazon technical expert, to its Amazon Fire as well. The Mayday feature is quite novel and a similar feature is currently not available on iPhone 5s, Galaxy S5 or any other smartphone in the market.
The Amazon Fire will hit the shelves on July 25 and interested customers can buy the 32/64GB versions of the handset for $199/$299 from AT&T on a two-year contract.
