Amazon has joined the smartphone game with their very own device – the Fire Phone, set to be shipped for retail sale on July 25th. With more and more people using their mobile phones to shop, compare products and read reviews, the Fire Phone is Amazon’s response to the evolving lifestyle of the modern consumer.
As expected, it comes with built-in features that aim to provide a comprehensive and streamlined online shopping experience. If you like to shop on Amazon and on your phone, then you’ll definitely like how everything’s seamlessly integrated here. It also has a wide range of other features that you won’t find on other smartphones, but whether all this is enough for it to make an impression on an already saturated market is anyone’s guess.
Features unique to the Fire Phone
Amazon didn’t hold back here and the Fire Phone is packed with highly competitive features that let it hold its own against top-tier smartphone competitors. The device comes with a sleek Gorilla Glass 3 4.7-inch display with a 1280×720 resolution at 315 ppi. You can opt for a 32GB or 64GB version depending on your storage needs.
The camera comes with a 13-megapixel sensor and an industry leading 2.0 aperture. Loaded with 4 special cameras, the Fire Phone also allows the viewer to interact with 3D images via the Dynamic Perspective interface. Aside from that, the phone comes with its own shutter key and allows users access to unlimited photo storage on Amazon Cloud Drive.
It’s also been designed to be as user-friendly as possible. By simply tilting the Fire Phone, for example, the user can scroll e-books, websites and view more information in Maps and the Amazon Shopping app.
Another unique feature is Firefly, a product recognition app that can detect printed phone numbers, e-mail addresses, business cards, songs, TV episodes, art, magazines, movies, QR codes and barcodes by simply pressing and holding the button on the handset. This clever software utilizes the phone’s camera and mines Amazon’s extensive database of product information.
What do you think of Amazon’s first foray into smartphones?
I really love some of the new features included in it such as Firefly and I can see where there is some practical use there. However, I wasn’t too pleased with the price point it came in at as I was hoping for Nexus-like competitive pricing to really draw in some marketshare. Amazon took the subsidized route with the Kindle Fire tablets with the idea that the product would pay for itself through app store sales.
Overall, let’s hope there’s a bit of a fire sale, if you know what I mean.
I like Amazon as a company, the are always changing the way things are done for the better. With their massive customer base it is no surprise they are bringing out a phone, I am sure it will be a success just from loyal fans alone.
It does everything I expected it to, but I do not see anything unique or amazing about it.
Well this is expected of them. Amazon is a big company and since it has grown from just being a online store and up it’s release of the Kindle it’s no wonder that they’d eventually release a phone. The feature I really like is the Firefly feature. That is probably the most useful phone feature I’ve ever seen in years. I’m looking forward to purchasing one of these soon enough, not unless Apple has a better option for their iPhone 6 that is.
I can vouch for Gorilla Glass. It’s extremely hard to crack and when it does, it still works perfectly fine (unless you total it). 64GB of space? Perfect for pretty much anything. Honestly for a phone you shouldn’t need more than 16. 13 megapixels is also pretty good for any phone. The only problem I see is that some features rely heavily on data and that certainly costs a whole lot. Overall this is a pretty good competitor phone.
I totally loved the 64GB part!!! I wish there were phones with that much space, but I wonder if this phone is as pricey as another person on here claimed it to be? If it is, I can imagine why… but the Gorilla Glass is such a wonderful feature on its own. If I was US based and an Amazon shopper, I’d surely get it 🙂
They sort of remind me of an iPhone from the back. This phone has some great features that I love. I tried this phone out but I went back to my iPhone because I like using apple products.
Let’s see how it competes with Android, OS and Windows Phone. The Fire OS is fairly new to the game and it needs a killer app to wow the consumer, aesthetic wise this phone has great looks and specifications. I can’t wait to see how it will turn out.
Looking forward to the Fire Phone becoming available in the UK – we’re getting it on the 30th September on a single network (O2), but it’ll probably be a while until you can just buy the phone without a contract, which is a shame.
The whole idea behind Firefly’s pretty interesting. I remember Google trying something similar with Google Goggles, but it wasn’t particularly useful or practical to use (eg: it’d take up to 10 seconds to recognize anything). If Firefly’s much quicker, I can see it having it’s uses.
I’m not surprised Amazon is getting into the mobile game. If anything it’s shocking it took this long. I wonder how much it will cost. They have potential to pick up a lot of customers if it’s affordable. It looks pretty good but I don’t think I’ll be switching phones any time soon.
Amazon is really doing a lot in order to compete directly with Google. Their choice of creating their own mobile OS shows that they are really trying to diverge from the Android track. Even in general, Amazon is working against Google. Their recent purchase of Twitch is a small but important step in moving against Youtube, as Twitch is a very rapidly growing program. Although I prefer Google, Amazon is doing quite a great job.
Recently heard about this, I think my sister has one. Thanks for the detailed post about it. Phone seems pretty interesting and is definitely packing some serious specs. Does it run off its own OS or does it run off of a modified Android rom? I’d have to contact AT&T and see how much this phone is with an upgrade available because it seems pretty awesome.
Doesn’t seem like it would be a huge consumer phone. It may sell a lot of copies at first, although I don’t see it as something people would call their ‘perfect phone’.
My thought, in my opinion this phone would only be great for those folks who reside in the US and shop at Amazon very often, but for the rest there are far better phones that offer more useful features. What I liked the phone is the space, the smallest one is of 32GB!
I think the camera is very good on this phone.
Other than that I think it’s very pricy for what it offers. They should really bring the price down as the phone doesn’t add something new or unique to the table.
Yeah, the Fire phone was a big flop. Amazon dun goofed on this one, big time. Their ad campaign was horrible, featuring two kid actors that everybody shared a mutual hatred for. The 4 cameras for a 3D effect was also stupid, because there was literally no use to it. Also, because Amazon had made a deal with AT&T exclusively, the one carrier where nobody would buy it, was also a mistake. The limited app store that can’t compete at all with the Play Store or App Store was even worse. If Amazon would just follow Google’s rules for Android, and just reskinned it like HTC, Samsung, or LG, then they’d probably have a better chance at actually making their “Fire” product line more profitable.
This phone sounds like such a great option for all those folks who actually are located in the US and enjoy ordering things from Amazon! It sounds like a great choice for them! If I lived in the US and I liked to order things from Amazon often enough I’d surely get this phone! I like the fact it offers even 64 GB storage! Hate it when phone offer only 8 or 16 GB only. My actual phone only offers 8GB 🙁 So restrictive!
The fire has been out for a little while but I have yet to see anyone with one. It’s a shame because I’d like to play around with one. Has anyone here used or purchased one?
I think Amazon made a bold, necessary decision by taking part in the smartphone game. The Fire Phone seems very cool, and it works together with the other Amazon technology. It looks very lively and I was watching the engineers explain the technology eagerly on the web, when they mentioned Firefly. What a useful little button.
This looks interesting but… Amazon? Really?
They’ve been doing stuff lately, they bought twitch.tv for example. Seems like they’re really trying to expand.
I think this phone might have a good chance of being successful actually, as long as it’s a good phone.
More of a chance now than some years ago during all the smartphone hype/craze.
Not alot of brand new brands coming out right now on the smart phone market so, people might be open minded for something completely new. 🙂
Good middle range smartphone as far as I’m concerned. It’s actually pretty impressive considering it’s from Amazon which is not natively an electronics company. The firefly feature seems particularly interesting to me. I like that it’s very functional and synergistic with Amazon’s primary market.