On Wednesday in Seattle, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took to the stage oat an event unveiling a long-rumored device: Amazon’s debut smartphone, Fire Phone.
This puts Amazon in direct competition with companies like Apple and Google, and is threatening the market share of media companies like Netflix and Spotify.
A MID-RANGE SMARTPHONE
The Fire Phone’s 4.7-inch display is only 720p, making a phone like the HTC One its superior. Powering the Fire Phone is a 2.2GHz Snapdragon processor with 2GB of RAM and an Adreno 330 graphics processor, the same one in Samsung’s Galaxy S5. It’s got a 13-megapixel camera with image stabilization, and is able to upload an unlimited number of photos to its cloud service.
A TASTE OF PRIME
Amazon is betting big on its glut of Prime-powered services; it’s even offering a year of Prime for free with the purchase of a Fire Phone (for a limited time), a $99 value.
But what does Prime get you? Thousands of ad-free movies and shows, around a million ad-free songs, and free two-day shipping, all services you’d have to pay a monthly fee for elsewhere. Amazon is taking on Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, and Beats all at once. It isn’t offering a superior service, though, but it’s offering just enough media to keep consumers inside Amazon’s world, watching Amazon’s content.
DYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE
Everyone was waiting for Amazon’s not-so-secret surprise: its front-facing cameras. The Fire Phone has one of every corner for mapping your face and creating a pseudo-3D environment on the display. You can look around maps, and tilt it to scroll through webpages, among other things.
FIREFLY KNOWS ALL
At a friend’s house and see a book you like? Normally you’d use Google to look it up, or even ask your friend to lend it to you. But Amazon’s Firefly can do one better: with a photo, it can recognize the book and let you buy it from Amazon. It works with pretty much everything, from jars of Nutella to classical paintings.
If you’re watching a show like “True Blood,” Firefly can recognize where you are in the show and provide you with relevant information thanks to Amazon’s X-Ray technology, which gives you relevant information based on the content you’re consuming.
AT&T EXCLUSIVE
Amazon didn’t unveil any sort of sponsored data plan, but it did snag an exclusive partnership with AT&T, making it the official carrier for the Fire Phone, at least for now. A 32GB Fire Phone will go for $199 on a two-year contract, or $649 without one. Judging by the specs, the phone will play nice on both AT&T as well as T-Mobile networks.