Amazon Fire Phone

[haven]

Amazon, known for its Kindle e-book readers and Kindle Fire tablets, announced its first smart phone. It's called the Fire Phone.

To date, Amazon's computing hardware has been sold at a discount to competitors' products. No so the Fire Phone, which costs $199 with a two year contract with AT&T Mobile in USA. Without a contract, the Fire Phone costs $649. These figures are comparable to the iPhone 5S and Samsung Galaxy S5.

Amazon sweetens the deal in three ways. First, the phone includes 32 GB of storage memory. It can cost as much as $100 extra for a boost from 16GB to 32GB memory in Apple and Samsung phones.

Second, Amazon is offering free unlimited cloud storage for photos taken with the Fire Phone. It's not clear to me what restrictions apply (forever? limited to the original owner, etc)?

Third, Amazon is including one year of membership in Amazon Prime. That's a $99 value. Prime members get purchases made on the Amazon website shipped free. Prime members get to stream and view a wide range of TV and movie content for free. And Amazon Prime members get access to a "lending library" of 500,000 titles that can be checked out and read for free.

The Fire Phone has a rear-facing camera with 13 megapixel sensor, an F2.0 lens, and optical image stabilization. This has the potential to be one of the best cameras in any phone. We won't know how well it works. until Amazon starts shipping the FirePhone toward the end of July. The F ire phone has a dedicated hardware button on the side to launch the photo app, and trip the shutter.

One downer is the Fire Phone's lower resolution screen of 1280x720 pixels. At 4.7 inches diagonally, that's 312 pixels per inch. That's considered an HD screen, but it's low res compared to the the top phones from competitors.

The Fire Phone appears to be well-built. Weight and thickness are slightly behind the standard set by today's top of the line models, but these small differences are likely to be noticed only when you're holding the Fire Phone in one hand, and a competitor in the other.

Amazon has added several software features that help you make purchases more easily with the Fire Phone. more about these features in my next post.

 

[haven]

The Fire Phone has several hardware/software features that make it unique. Here are the most important.

First, there's MayDay, a link to Amazon tech support that's free and available anytime. The consultant can help with any operation of the phone. If the issue rests with AT&T, your link will be transferred to the wireless provider. MayDay has been available on Kindle Fire tablets for several months. Wait times for assistance have been in the 15 second range, and customers are generally happy with the service.

The value of this service can't be overstated. Until now, help with the operations of an Android phone have been the responsibility of the cell phone provider, and they have been terrible at it. Amazon has a major advantage with MayDay.

Second, there's Dynamic Perspective. The phone has four front facing cameras that track your head movement. The information is used to move the objects on the screen, allowing you to change your perspective. For now, the effect works with the lock screen images, navigation of menus, and a couple of games. Amazon is making a software development kit available to app creators so they can integrate the function into their software.

Dynamic Perspective has its problems. First, when turned on, the program scans your face constantly for information. That's got to burn through battery power. Second, when Apple tried a similar perspective shifting feature in iOS, many people reported feeling queasy when the screen moved. And then there's the creepy feeling that your phone is watching you.

If third party developers adopt Dynamic Perspective, it could become a new model for interface with a portable device. That's a big "if."

I think Dynamic Perspective is one reason why the Fire Phone has a screen with lower resolution than many competitors. It takes computing power to move dots on the screen. Having fewer dots reduces the burden on processor and battery.

Some of the Dynamic Perspective features, like scrolling a screen and navigating menus, can be accomplished by tilting the phone. So maybe we don't need to have our faces scanned. This will become clear when the phone ships in July.

A third feature that Amazon is promoting is called Firefly. It's software that scans objects, and tries to find information about the object in a cloud database. They claim to have information on more than 100 million objects, linked by barcodes, QR codes, URLs, text, and images like book covers and wine labels. For well-known art like a famous painting, Firefly links to the Wikipedia page describing the art work. Like the Shazam app, Firefly can recognize what song is playing in an elevator or on the radio. In some cases, Firefly can identify TV shows by the audio track. Firefly keeps a history of the objects scanned, making it easy to purchase books, audio and video content. From Amazon, of course.

It's unknown if Firefly will help with other sorts of real-world objects, like translating a camera image of a street sign or a menu in a foreign language. Google has this capability in Google Translate.

Finally, there's Active Widgets. Amazon has added a preview function to the carousel view of apps installed on the phone. A calendar app can show a quick view of upcoming appointments. A mail app can show recent email arrivals. All without launching the app or leaving the main menu. There's a software development kit to help app developers add Active Widgets to their programs.

 

[haven]

Press reactions to the Fire Phone have been mixed. Many were disappointed that the price for the phone is so high. It costs just as much as top-of-the-line models from Apple, Samsung and other manufacturers.

Others see the new software as merely a way to increase people's use of Amazon's other services such as merchandizing and streaming media. This makes the phone useful primarily to people who shop on Amazon a lot.

A common reaction among the tech press is that they expected some sort of deal between Amazon and AT&T, which is the exclusive cell phone carrier for the Fire Phone in USA. For example, AT&T could have waived the megabytes used during streaming a video or music from Amazon to your phone. Or at the least, the megabytes used to upload a Firefly image to Amazon's cloud compute servers for analysis. This sort of deal may yet be announced.

If all you want is a functional Android smartphone, consider the new Motorola Moto G with LTE. This phone costs $219 without contract, not $650 like the Fire Phone. Or how about the Google Nexus 5, an excellent smartphone that costs $350 without contract. (Google may introduce the Nexus 6 next week.) Both the Moto G and the Nexus 5 run stock Android and have full access to all the Google Play apps. The Fire Phone is dependent on Amazon to certify apps (there are 500,000 apps in the Amazon app store), and to derive new versions of Fire OS from Android.

 

[haven]

How about the Fire Phone when traveling to another country? The phone uses a nano-SIM card, so it should be possible to switch SIMs and use the phone on another country's GSM network. The Fire Phone supports LTE in 9 frequency bands, so it's likely to be compatible with LTE offered in major foreign cities.

Of course, the Fire Phone is locked to the AT&T network in USA, so you'll have to get AT&T to unlock the phone so you can use it outside the country.

Amazon intends to sell the Fire Phone in other countries at some point in the future.

 

[nwoods]

My concern is the custom OS. How often will it be updated? When will the phone be orphaned? Apple has done an excellent job keeping its product line viable with regards to OS updates. Yes, the feature set is behind what Samsung is offering, but my 3 year old iPhone 4s is every bit as current as the latest iPhone 5s.... mostly

The Fire seems cool, but more of a short term novelty gadget, in my opinion.

 

[Chazz Layne]

I think it needs a few more cameras, 6 just doesn't cut it...

 

[haven]

Amazon has a pretty good record of updating the Fire OS in its tablets. Amazon is in the same position as Apple in their ability to make downloads available directly to the tablet or phone owner, without passing through the cell phone company. Maybe that's why Amazon limits its devices to the AT&T cell phone network in USA.

Most manufacturers have a two year limit to the guarantee of software updates. That's two years from when the device was introduced, not two years from when you purchased it. Apple, Samsung, and Google (Nexus) all have a two year sunset clause for software updates. In the case of stock Android (Nexus, some Motorola), enthusiast groups have had some success figuring out how to get the latest OS running on older hardware.

FYI, Apple says the new iOS 8 will work on the 4S. iPhone 4 and earlier are out of luck.