Amazon decided it wanted to play with the big boy now. They have officially released their new Amazon Fire Phone, the first ever smartphone with Dynamic Perspective and Firefly. The phone supports a 2.2 GHz Snapdragon 800 processor with 2GB of RAM and a 4.7″ HD display with a “custom graphics engine” that renders at 60FPS. The phone is advertised with 285 hours of standby time, 22 hours of talk time, 65 hours of audio playback, and up to 11 hours of video playback. That’s a whole lot of of battery life. But, the phone is only available on AT&T services. Sorry 4/5’s of America!
The phone has a new Dynamic Perspective feature, which allows you to tilt the phone around and see different perspectives of things on the lock screen and on games. Sort of like how the 3DS was originally marketed. With a flick of the wrist, you can navigate through menus and access shortcuts.
With the new Firefly technology, you can quickly search up movies, tv shows, songs, and products by pressing the Firefly button and it’ll send you directly to their store/site on Amazon. Pretty useful feature, but don’t we have apps that already do that?
Lastly, the phone comes with Mayday, something that the Amazon Kindle Fire HD comes with. With the press of a button, you can get on-device video support with an expert for your phone 24/7. I think this is pretty cool for the people who don’t know how to use smartphones (90% of the country), but what about the people who do? What do any of these features do for us specifically?
From the looks of it, the Fire Phone is running it’s own Amazon OS. The OS looks like it’ll be locked into the stock OS without any way to root the phone and install new ROMs and Kernals. This is a huge turn-off for me and any other person who likes to tinker with the innerworks of their phone. Another huge problem I have with this is that it uses the Amazon App Store instead of the Google Play Store. Google Play has millions of more apps than it’s “rival”. So in all, this phone doesn’t seem marketed to people with Galaxys. This is more towards people with iPhones that don’t know how to use them. Don’t drop a dime and your phone for this yet! Let’s see what more Amazon does with this before we waste our money on yet another flop of a smartphone. What do you guys think? Tell us down in the comments below!