Amazon’s long-rumored smartphone has been unveiled at the retail giant’s launch event, and it is called the Fire Phone.
The first smartphone from Amazon, the Fire Phone joins the growing stable of hardware including the Kindle, Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HDX, with the mobile device offering a 4.7-inch IPS LCD display with 590 nits of brightness, dynamic image contrast, and a circular polarizer.
Encased in a rubber frame with aluminum buttons and Gorilla Glass 3 on the front, the Fire Phone uses a quad-core 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with 2GB of RAM and an Adreno 330 GPU.
On the back is a 13-megapixel camera with flash, optical image stabilization, and an f/2.0 five-element lens, with a dedicated button on the side for taking photographs, with Fire Phone owners benefiting from free unlimited photo storage on Amazon Cloud Drive. Stereo speakers with Dolby Digital Plus audio, headphones with a tangle-free design and magnetic earbuds.
As previously rumored, Amazon has opted to include a 3D interface on their smartphone, called Dynamic Perspective. Using a collection of four extra cameras on the front, it is able to sense of depth to the lock screen and apps, with the perspective changing in relation to the user’s face. Tilting and gestures are also prevalent in the device, with extra menus appearing when the Fire Phone is moved quickly to one side.
One example app used tilting to trigger the zooming of a product image, with side tilting allowing the app to cycle through all the available images. Dynamic Perspective will also be available for app developers to use in their apps,. The main navigation of the Fire Phone uses the carousel seen elsewhere on Amazon’s Fire OS devices, with a few changes.
Scrolling through the carousel now brings up a preview of items within the app, such as a list of recent e-mails. A more-typical Android app grid is also available. Just like the Kindle Fire tablets, the Fire Phone will work with all of Amazon’s online services.
Access to Prime Music and Prime Video are included, as well as reading Kindle books with Amazon’s Immersion Reading, Kindle Newsstand, and Comixology.
The Mayday support feature also makes an appearance on the Fire Phone, which again provides 24-7 support at no extra charge. Amazon revealed Firefly for the first time at the event, a feature that allows for product recognition using the rear camera or the Fire Phone’s microphones.
The Amazon Fire Phone with 32GB of storage is being sold as a pre-order for $200 on a two-year AT&T contract, while a second 64GB version will cost $300. Both versions will include 12 months of free Amazon Prime, a service which typically comes with a $99 annual fee.