Gallery: A Visual Tour of Amazon's New Fire Phone
Mike Kane/Bloomberg via Getty01Amazon CEO Bezos Introduces Smartphone to Take on Apple, Samsung
Amazon's Fire Phone: Won't be hard to get one of these for Christmas.
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The phone will come with app-specific "tilt" features that help surface in-app menus. They're designed for one-handed usage of the phone—you just flick it back and forth and sub-menus open up. For example, tilting while listening to music can bring up lyrics, tilting in calendar gives you a digest of your upcoming schedule, tilting in email gives you the entire thread with the sender.
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A shortcuts list can be brought up from the main menu by tilting the phone slightly to the left. Tilting it to the right will bring up notifications and weather information.
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The phone's Firefly feature is able to recognize snippets of audio from movies and TV shows, and even pick out the specific scenes they're from. You can also use it like Shazam to simply identify songs that are playing in the background.
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While the Fire uses "Nokia-licensed cartography" for its Maps app, Amazon developed the middleware, the A9 search, the application engine, and the turn-by-turn directions.
Photo: David Ryder/Getty06Amazon Unveils Its First Smartphone
Like the front of the phone, the back also comes coated in Gorilla Glass 3. You'll get a 13-megapixel camera with optical stabilization and an F2.0 lens, not to mention unlimited cloud storage for all the photos you take.
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Every Fire Phone comes with a pair of tangle-resistant magnetic earbuds. The ergonomic tips stick together when stored in your pocket or bag to help prevent tangles and knots.
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In Firefly's picture mode, it looks like a bunch of magical fireflies are swarming the object onscreen. If recognized, the Firefly queue updates depending on the object — phone numbers can be called or added to contacts and movie audio can bring up the entry on IMDB.
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Rubberized sides help protect the Fire Phone and add some much needed grippiness to the glass coated handset.
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Firefly is not meant to recognize handwritten notes, but Amazon says it may recognize very neat handwriting for its phone-number recognition feature. When I tested it out, it had a bit of trouble recognizing random objects, though it does fine with anything that has a UPC code or a recognizable logo.
