This morning, Amazon announced their first smartphone, aptly named the Fire Phone. The Amazon Fire Phone comes with all kinds of goodies, but as far as hardware goes we’re looking at a 4.7-inch IPS LCD display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB or 64GB of storage. It also has a 13MP camera on the back, with plenty more cameras on the front. It kind of looks like a Nexus 4 mixed with an iPhone 5c. It also has all kinds of software features like MayDay which is their 24/7 365 tech support for the Fire Phone and Kindle Fire HDX. There’s also FireFly which can basically tell you anything about everything.
Amazon is giving out free one-year subscriptions to Amazon Prime. Which typically costs $99/year. So that’s an extra $99 in the price of the phone right there, which probably explains why it’s $199 on contract and $649 off contract. Oh it’s also exclusive to AT&T right now, which isn’t good for Amazon. But they are enticing you in with the Amazon Prime subscription. For those unaware, Amazon Prime includes free two-day shipping on a number of items, or $3.99 for next day delivery. We also have Amazon Prime Instant Video which gives us all kinds of great video content and they just announced Amazon Prime Music earlier this week. So it’s a lot more than just free shipping on a ton of Amazon items, which is what it really started out as. As far as Instant Video goes, Prime members now have over 40,000 titles, that’s up from 5,000 titles just a year ago. That’s a pretty big increase, in my opinion.
I’ve been subscribed to Amazon Prime for a few years now and love the service, and it just keeps getting better. Yeah they upped the price this year to $99 from $79/year, but that’s the first increase in like 9 years. So I think we can live with it. Are any of you interested in the Amazon Fire Phone? Let us know in the comments down below.