The much awaited, the much rumoured and the much talked about Amazon’s new 3D phone is out! It called the Fire phone, and from what we can gather, there are a lot of things to talk about.
But first things first… Is it really a 3D phone?
No, it is not a 3D phone in truest sense, It does not show you pictures in true 3D. However, it does get pretty close to it for a naked eye view. Given the way our eyes are built, we cannot see 3D on flat surface unless you use a “3D glass” that adds the third perspective to your sight.
So how can Amazon’s Fire phone be called a 3D phone?
Because it adds depth to the images by tracking the motion of your head (or eyes). The Fire Phone has corner-mounted, front-facing infrared cameras that create excellent quasi 3D effect. As the phone understands the location of your eyes, it can shift images on the screed to give you perspective of depth and that’s why they appear to be 3 dimensional!
In Amazon’s own words, they call the technology as “Dynamic Perspective”, which creates 3D images that run at 60 frames per second giving you a smooth on screen quasi 3D experience.
Before we move on the specifications and other features of the phone, the readers will need to understand that Fire phone has been built with Amazon Prime customers in mind. Amazon’s main purpose behind bringing Fire phone is not as much to do with making profits by selling the phone, but to build a device that will push their wide array of content offerings.
Specifications
As far as the specifications of the phone go, they are not anything out of the world. Fire Phone sports a 4.7″ HD LCD display with 1280 X720 resolution. It has a 13 mp rear facing camera and 2.1 mp front camera.
The phone is powered by 2.2GHz Quad-core Snapdragon 800 CPU, with Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB of RAM. The onboard storage is available into 2 variants, 32 GB and 64 GB.
In terms of connectivity, it supports 9 bands of LTE (4G), 3G, Wi-fi and all other regular connectivity options. The battery is 2400 mAh giving 22 hour talk time and 285 hours of standby time.
Main Features
While Dynamic Perspective is it’s main feature, Fire phone does have some nifty features that make it quite attractive especially for Amazon Prime subscribers.
Firefly Technology: Firefly is a recognition engine that essentially enables phone users to identify Phone numbers, email addresses, movies, TV series, music and many household items as well. Firefly is very similar to Shazam, but with capacity to identify many different types of items including books, DVDs, CDs, video games etc. It essentially uses the on-board camera to identify the objects and then on-the-fly brings back related information from various sources including IMBD, Amazon and others.
MayDay: This is surely a first on any phone and again geared towards Amazon Prime subscribers. Mayday is essentially a free and live on-device tech support that can be accessed by a touch of a single button. The customer support personnel will help out users on anything you want do or carry out on your phone. And yes, Amazon promises a response time of 15 seconds or less!
Prime Customer Advantages: Like we have mentioned earlier, Fire Phone has been tailor made for Prime subscribers, and they get plenty of benefits including streaming of top TV shows on their phone, access to Amazon Prime music where users can stream and download more than a million songs.
Apart from this kindle owners can now start getting free books their lending library, so they can read the book and return it back (so basically it will disappear from Kindle).
Fire OS 3.5.0: The new Fire OS is an Android fork and supports all Android apps as well. The new OS adds cloud services, a content-forward user interface, built-in media libraries, productivity apps, and platform enhancements to integrate Amazon’s digital content and improve performance.
Fire Phone Price
The Fire phone is currently available for pre-order for AT&T customers in the US for $199 for a 32GB and $299 for 64GB variant. On the other hand the unlocked version is available $649 and $749 respectively.
So, while Fire phone sounds really great, it has been primarily made with Prime users in mind. I do not think non-prime users, especially Indians will find anything too attractive about it.
Do let us know your views on Fire Phone…
