Amazon Fire Phone Specs, Features Revealed
The Amazon Fire Phone was revealed Wednesday by the company's founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, and consumers are reveling at some of the new features. Dynamic Perspective, Mayday, the unique Fire OS, Firefly identification technology, and other features rival current top smartphones, though this phone is exclusively on AT&T.
Amazon's phone runs a 2.2 Ghz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor with Adreno 330 GPU, 2GB of ram, a 4.7-inch HD display with 1280 x 720 resolution at 315 ppi, 32 or 64 GB of storage and a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera. While the smartphone is comparable to the HTC One M8, the Samsung Galaxy S5 and the iPhone 5S, what sets it apart are its unique features.
Dynamic Perspective is a unique display system that lets users see into the screen— it's not 3D technology, but is similarly immersive. Using four cameras on the corners of the phone, it allows users to scroll with their eyes, tilt and swivel the handset to access menus and use other short cuts.
Mayday is another feature touted by Amazon that gives users one-touch access to a live, on-screen customer service person in "15 seconds or less," their website says. This was available on the Kindle Fire HDX, but this time it also connects to AT&T's customer service as well.
Though the Fire Phone's camera seems pretty good at 13 MP, the true beauty of it is that any Amazon Phone user will have access to unlimited cloud space for their photos. The era of deleting photos to make space is on its way out.
One of the biggest features Bezos demonstrated was Firefly, which uses scanning technology for 70 million pictures, products and multimedia to instantly get users the product on the Amazon store or look up information. Though the feature is novel, it did garner criticism from tech for seemingly pushing users to become Amazon Prime customers.
Another sticking point about the Fire Phone: the app ecosystem is only 240,000 apps strong and most of those were designed for Amazon's tablets. Android and iPhone each have over a million apps available.
Amazon's Fire Phone runs Fire OS, a customized version of Android. It is available for pre-order now and ships July 25.