Amazon presents its first ever smartphone, Fire. Designed by Amazon, it has a 4.7inch HD LCD display and weighs at 160 grams. After understanding the device Amazon is trying to sell, Fire brings to mind a product birthed from the amalgamation of an iPhone and a Samsung phone.
Fire boasts as the only smartphone in the market with Dynamic Perspective and Firefly technology. It also tries to set itself apart from other smartphones in the market by adding on other interesting features. Dynamic Perspective uses a custom-designed sensor system that will respond to how users hold and move the phone. Your phone’s wallpaper will look much more cooler, for sure. The brilliance of the dynamic perspective is unleashed when accessing applications like the built-in application: Maps.
Enter a world of three-dimensional structures, and get around town better, as landmarks can now be erected 3D inside your screen. It seems like a more beneficial function than the parallax motion introduced in the iPhone iOS7.
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The dynamic perspective also makes game plays more, well, dynamic; but unfortunately not all applications will support the Dynamic Perspective.
Also similar to the Samsung Galaxy S4’s Smart Pause and Smart Scroll feature, Fire allows gestures like auto-scroll for users to navigate through long articles just by tipping the device away and towards the body. The user can stop the scrolling by tapping on the screen and the scrolling speed can also be adjusted. The four special cameras located on the four corners of Fire ensure that your head can be easily detected even from different directions. Equipped on the cameras are infrared lights, which can detect the position of your head even in low-light conditions.
The Firefly feature, however, seems to be the most endearing feature of Fire. When activated, Firefly can recognise a range of information from printed web, email addresses, phone numbers, QR codes, bar codes, artwork, movies to music and many more. And that’s not all; it will also tell you where you can get them — primarily at Amazon.com. Just like scanning an object, aim your phone at almost anything you wish to know more details about, then press and hold the Firefly button on the left side of the phone.
Take example: You switch on the television and catch a movie halfway into the story and you wish to find out who is the actor playing the lead role. You can activate Firefly and it will identify who the actor is.
Speaking of films, videographers on-the-go will love the camera on this phone as Fire has the capacity to tape 1080p from both front and back camera! The Firefly button also doubles as the camera button, which you can activate with just a click — that’s one step faster than the iPhone’s iOS 7 shortcut: swipe up from the bottom of the screen.
The 13 megapixel back camera comes with panorama and burst camera functions but it also has an additional lenticular feature, which gives your pictures a 3D effect. When taking photos in low light conditions without the use of flash, the optical image stabilisation in the camera will reduce blurring and make your pictures less grainy.
If you constantly love using your phone single-handedly, you will also be thrilled by this function: Just flip your phone downwards and up again, and you can access sidebars and other options without having to click any button or swipe across the screen.
CEO of the Amazon website, Jeff Bezos’s move to develop Fire can be construed as a long-term strategy for churning sales for Amazon and this is somewhat akin to Apple’s possessive strategy of restricting application downloads outside of the Apple Appstore. Fire will not be hosting Google applications like Google Maps and Gmail, to name a few.
At the moment, however, this smartphone might be more readily available and appealing for residents of the United States as the phone can only be powered exclusively by AT&T’s 4G LTE network. Prices for Fire starts at US$199 for 32 GB and US$299 for 64 GB, pre-order has started, and the Fire will be released on July 25, 2014.
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