This morning, Amazon is holding their event in Seattle where they are announcing their Amazon Fire Phone. This is the company’s first smartphone. As Jeff Bezos stated, they wanted to build a “better smartphone” which is exactly what the Fire Phone appears to be. it kind of looks like a mix of a Nexus 4 and a iPhone 5C but it does have plenty of cameras on the front. Amazon is using Gorilla Glass 3 here with a rubber frame. The buttons are indeed aluminum though. It’s also featuring a 4.7-inch IPS LCD display, which does 590 nits of brightness, so it gets pretty bright which is good. As far as the processor goes it’s running the Snapdragon 800 with an Adreno 330 GPU and has 2GB of RAM. On the back we’ve got a 13MP camera with f/2.0 aperture. The best part of the camera is that the Fire Phone includes unlimited photo storage in Amazon’s cloud storage. There’s also dual-stereo speakers on the bottom of the Fire Phone, which should give us a good sound experience.
Amazon is also shipping a new set of earbuds with the Fire Phone – something you don’t see with many smartphones these days – it has a tangle free cord as well as magnetic earbuds. Amazon is also bringing Second Screen and X-Ray to the Fire Phone so you can fling movies and TV shows from your Fire Phone to the Fire TV or your Kindle Fire HDX. Next up is ASAP, which includes predictive caching and gets better the more you use it. It predicts what you want to do based on the time of day. Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu Plus, ESPN are all on board. Thanks to the Amazon App Store and it’s 240,000 apps of course.
Next up is music. Which Amazon just recently announced Prime Music, and as expected it’s included in the Fire Phone. What else would you expect? Prime Music has millions of songs available for you to stream on your Fire Phone, Fire TV, and Kindle Fire HDX’s, as well as other platforms. Then there’s the reading experience. Since Amazon is known for their e-readers, you know they had to add this in. The Fire Phone features immersive mode, as well as WhisperSync for Voice. Which are features on the Kindle Fire HDX.
Mayday will also be on the Fire Phone, which Amazon takes a stab at all the Android forums out there, or as they called it “Droid Forums”. So now you have live support on your smartphone. Pretty cool actually, and it’s done quite well on the Kindle Fire line of tablets in the past year. Mayday will answer your call in 15 seconds or less and is available 24/7, 365 days a year. It’s also available on WiFi, 3G and 4G LTE.
Then there’s Firefly, which basically is like Google Goggles from back in the day. Point your camera at a book, movie, or really anything and it’ll tell you what it is and where you can buy it. Of course, Amazon’s store would be the top choice. Firefly does also recognize over 100,000 different items, even URLs. And by the way, there’s a dedicated Firefly button on the left side of the Fire Phone.
