Everything You Need To Know About Amazon's Fire Phone | TechTree.com

Everything You Need To Know About Amazon's Fire Phone

Does it bring anything new to the table?

 
Everything You Need To Know About Amazon's Fire Phone

Amazon's much-anticipated smartphone was unveiled amidst much fanfare in Seattle. Dubbed as the Fire Phone, it boasts of a gesture-based user interface. The handset sports a 4.7-inch HD display. It is powered by a quad-core Snapdragon chipset clocked at 2.2 GHz. Other specs include a 13 megapixel camera, 32 / 64 GB storage, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth 3.0, and 2400 mAh battery. The hardware is on par, if not better, than many of the high-end smartphones. Let's find out if the Fire Phone brings anything new to the table.

Dynamic Perspective
Amazon claims that Dynamic Perspective feature allows you to interact with your smartphone like never before. Of course, they've conveniently forgotten similar motion and auto-scroll gestures found on Samsung's high-end GALAXY handsets. The phone has a custom sensor system to keep track these gestures, which does sound interesting. It looks impressive in promos too, but I doubt if it will be of any practical use.

 

Firefly
Firefly is a glorified AR app that uses camera to identify and search products. It can detect printed text on posters, magazines, and business cards much like how it works with Bing Vision. It also helps you recognise a book and buy it from Amazon right away. Such features are already built into high-end Sony Android phones. So while it's a good addition to the list of features, there's nothing new here.



Mayday
Amazon is going to offer live tech-support on the Fire phone. If you run into a problem with your device, all you have to do is hit the Mayday button, and an Amazon expert will help you via live video. That's quite like how IT managers help you solve the computer issues using TeamViewer. According to Amazon, help will be offered in 15 seconds or less. Now this is promising, but I doubt this feature will see a day of light outside the US.



Low-Light Photography
The Amazon Fire phone features a 13 megapixel camera with a fast five-lens assembly and OIS (Optical Image Stabilisation). This will help you take sharp images even in low-light conditions. This is definitely a great addition, but not really new. This technology was brought to smartphone cameras by Nokia back in 2012. The other much-hyped camera feature HDR (High Dynamic Range) is available on almost all high-end Android phones.



User Interface
The Amazon phone's homescreen won't look like your regular Android phone. The online retailer uses highly customised version of Android called the Fire OS. The platform comes with a plethora of digital content and cloud services from Amazon. Going by the promos, you can scan, and delete emails, see your next appointment, access favourite websites right from the homescreen (Carousel). What remains to be seen is that whether the interface is user friendly.


Tags : Mobile Phones, Android, Amazon

 
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