Amazon has really out done itself with its first step in to the smart phone market. The new Amazon Fire Phone supports 3G and 4G connectivity and uses a nano SIM. It was announced in June this year and is expected to be released this month. It weighs 160 grams and has a 4.7 inch IPS LCD capacitive touch screen with 16 M colors and, naturally, also supports multi-touch.
The new phone has two memory options: a 32 GB option and a 64 GB option, the RAM is apparently 2 GB for both which seems upsetting, but read on because this phone genuinely has something different to show us!
It allows the usual; GPRS, EDGE, WLAN, Bluetooth, NFC and USB options and on top of that has a 13 MP primary camera, wait for it, that’s not all. The camera allows optical image stabilization, LED flash and auto-focus along with geo-tagging. The secondary camera is not too bad either, it’s a humble 2.1 MP camera which also facilitates video making.
Moving on to the hardware, this phone has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset along with a Quad Core 2.2 GHz Krait 400 CPU and the Adreno 330 GPU. Moreover, all of this is integrated with an Amazon based operating system called Amazon Fire OS v3.5.
Now that we’re done with most of the boring technical details let me introduce you to how this phone has genuinely distinguished itself and attracted the market.
The Amazon Fire Phone has two such attractive attributes; one is the Firefly, which allows the user to press a button and media or information from the external environment can be detected and acquired or bought on the phone. Some of you may be thinking this is kind of like Shazam. Well, basically, yes it is. But expand Shazam from music to just about everything and you will have the Firefly.
Another highly attractive feature is the Dynamic Perspective user interface. This operates through 4 front facing camera sensors on the phone which detect special relations distance from the phone. The cameras allow the phone to assess how the user is viewing the phone, and as a result gives the user different views of the same picture from different angles as they would appear in reality, and this is not only a home screen bound and uselessly attractive gimmick. It is utilized in different apps and seeks to enhance the gaming experience on the phone as well. There is one apparent uncertainty though, the Fire Phone has a 2400 mAh battery which should be adequate for most high-end smartphone but may prove to be inadequate for this phone considering the extra sensors, display options and cameras in this phone but that, only time can assure us of. The 32 GB version of the phone is now available on AT&T at $199.
Michael Turner
