Amazon's new Fire Phone is the company's first smartphone, and it certainly boasts some great features. But are some of these features being oversold by Amazon?
Amazon entered a new market yesterday with the release of their first smartphone, the Fire Phone. Starting at $199 under a two year contract with AT&T and going up to $650 off contract, the phone boasts some great features, including its screen quality and solid build. It also includes some new 3D features, which Amazon has been promoting as one of the devices main features.
The feature uses four sensors dotted around the front of the phone, which enables the device to determine the position of the user relative to the device’s screen. Images on the screen are then adjusted to create 3D looking perspectives.
While the feature, called “dynamic perspective,” certainly sounds cool, it seems that Amazon has oversold it. In reality, dynamic perspective is not a big part of the Fire Phone experience. According to a Venture Beat article, the feature works well in games, but is more of a novelty in things like maps. Outside maps and games, the feature is not used much.
This is also true of the “Firefly” feature, which uses the rear-facing camera to recognize items in the world and provide users with information about the item including where they can buy it. While this feature may come in handy, it certainly will not be used very often.
Despite this, the features, along with the fact that the device is well integrated with services like Kindle and Amazon Prime, will likely lure a number of users to buy the phone.
Other features of the device include a 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 CPU, 2GB of RAM, a 4.7″ display, and either 32GB or 64GB of storage. It runs on Fire OS 3.5, which is base on Google’s Android.
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