First Look At Amazon’s New Phone

The iPhone-Killer was presented yesterday and it impressed reviewers with innovative features.

Amazon put alot of thought into ways to differentiate their hardware and to offer some truly ingenious innovation. First of all, the Fire Phone has 4 cameras around the display that can track your viewing perspective to make objects on the screen accessible in a kind of 3D view. This technology also allows for navigation by tilting instead of swiping. And it should offer some interesting possibilities for App and games developers.
The second interesting invention is the “Firefly” feature which uses the camera to scan any object or surface in order to identify products, even movies, tv shows or songs. Ultimately it will link you to the Amazon Shop to buy them there, of course. Techcrunch calls it a “Shazam for everything”.
If you’re buying digital goods, make sure to use the 1000 Amazon Coins you get with your Fire Phone and save your media in the free unlimited Amazon Cloud Drive. Oh, and why not stream video and music with Amazon Prime for free for one year?

If you run into problems, just hit the “Mayday-Button” to get a customer support person on your screen.

Wired lists some of the technical specs: “It has a 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 system-on-a-chip at its heart with 2GB RAM, just like other previous generation Android phones out there. It also has a 2,400 mAh battery that Amazon says should last “all day,” and a 13-megapixel main camera with optical stabilization and an F2.0 lens. Like Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets, the Fire Phone’s speakers offer Dolby virtual surround sound and what the company describes as tangle-free earbuds.”

While the Fire Phone basically runs on Android, it is of course Amazon’s version of Android with Amazon’s choice of Apps made available. With 240.000 Apps consumers should be fine, though. Two notable omissions are Youtube and Snapchat.

All in all, Amazon seems to have a pretty good hardware ecosystem in place to lure you away from Apple or Google, ranging from the Kindle Reader to the Kindle Fire tablet to the Fire TV to the Fire Phone.