As expected Amazon has launched its first smartphone. Called Amazon Fire Phone, it features a Gorilla Glass display in a rubber frame and surely seems to have a few cameras (four to be specific) on the front.
It has a 4.7-inch 720p display with 590nits of brightness, aluminum buttons, a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor clocked at 2.2GHz with Adreno 330 GPU, 2GB of RAM and a 13-megapixel f/2.0 rear camera with optical image stabilization.
The Amazon Fire Phone comes with unlimited photo storage in the cloud with Amazon Cloud Drive, which is a massive improvement over the 5GB free storage Apple provides with iCloud.
The phone also features stereo speakers with Dolby Digital plus surround sound and will come with tangle-free earphones.
For users in the US, it will support X-Ray feature that will provide a second screen experience along with Amazon Prime videos. Of course, it will work with the recently launched Amazon Prime Music service as well.
We haven’t heard anything about the 3D UI, yet, but Amazon has certainly built this phone for reading as well with its Kindle service.
The Fire Phone will come with free MayDay support that will provide live technical support to users with a real tech support person interacting over video.
The Fire Phone has a Firefly button that recognizes objects and text from the camera’s viewfinder. It also identifies songs from music playing in the background as well as the soap you are watching on TV right down to the episode. It keeps a history of things you have tagged and you can buy them off Amazon directly from your phone.
And finally, we get our first view of the Amazon Fire Phone’s 3D UI. ”What if there were a thousand artists standing by to redraw the picture every time you moved your head?” Jeff Bezos asks.
The UI gives a nice perspective view of images on the display, so you get a clearer 3D view of the Empire State Building on the maps app, for instance. You can tilt the phone sideways to get more information and play with the UI. In the web browser you can scroll by tilting the phone while in the gallery you can zoom in and out of photos. Seems a tad confusing at the moment.
The phone will come with interesting lock screens as well, like one where there is a clock on a rock with moss covering it and a forest behind it.
The Fire Phone knows where the user’s head is at all times and refreshes it many times every second. You can check out the tech behind it here.
Amazon is launching the Fire Phone as an AT&T exclusive for $199 over a two-year contract. There is no word if it will come to India any time soon.
