The first smartphone designed by Amazon is officially out in the wild. Amazon unveiled their new mobile device called Fire Phone yesterday in Seattle.
New addition to Amazon's mobile devices
The Fire Phone is the latest in a line of "Fire" tablets and streaming devices. Being out in the wild is one thing. Standing-out in an arguably saturated market dominated by Apple and Samsung is a whole different matter.
The Fire Phone naturally is intended to work with Amazon's various services and online commerce out of the box.
For example, at a press of a button, you can let the Fire Phone recognize a physical object such as a can of Coke, or a piece of art such as a song or a picture. Once the phone recognizes the object, you can directly look for and purchase it on Amazon.com. This unique feature is aptly called "Firefly" and frankly it reminds me of Shazam's big brother. :)
Fire Phone tech specs and prices
The Fire Phone features a 4.7 inch display, 2 GB of RAM memory and a quad-core 2.2 Ghz CPU. The camera takes shots of up to 13 megapixels. But wait, there's five cameras on the phone in total - 4 at the front that pick up on your head's movements, and 1 at the back!
Fire Phone runs on Amazon-modified Android operating system called "Fire OS".
Price-wise, the 32 GB version of the phone costs USD 199 or USD 299 for the 64-GB version exclusively at AT&T.
Amazon Fire Phone Hands On - YouTube video
Just as the rest of the major mobile technology giants, the Fire Phone is clearly trying to bring Amazon users into a company-regulated ecosystem.
