Five burning questions about Amazon Fire smartphone
After endless rumors, Amazon's smartphone is a real thing.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos introduced the Amazon Fire smartphone during a event Wednesday in Seattle. "Fire Phone puts everything you love about Amazon in the palm of your hand," Bezos said in a statement.
The Fire ships July 25 on AT&T's wireless network starting at $199 for a 32 GB model with a two-year contract. It's also available at 64 GB for $299.
BAIG FIRST LOOK: Will Amazon phone catch Fire?
The smartphone is Amazon's latest leap into the hardware business, joining its Kindle line of e-readers and tablets and the Fire TV set-top box.
Here are 5 burning questions about Amazon's smartphone:
1. What is Dynamic Perspective?
It's arguably the biggest Fire feature revealed. Amazon claims the head- and eye-tracking tech enables Fire to do things "not possible on other smartphones." The technology allows Fire to respond to how a user manipulates the phone, presenting some content from a 3-D view. You will be able to navigate apps and web pages on the phone using auto-scrolling or tilting the device. Another example referenced games, where players can move their head to look around corners or above obstacles. Even lock screens feature wallpaper displayed from 3-D perspective.
2. How does it work?
The smartphone combines four "ultra-low" power corner cameras, four infrared LEDs on the face, a dedicated processor, "real-time computer vision algorithms" and a graphics rendering engine to track the user's head movements in real time. A developer document explaining the head tracking tech suggests app developers can use both the cameras and infrared or just the cameras to conserve power.
3. Any other big features that make Fire appealing?
Most notable is Firefly. It uses image, text and audio recognition to pick out anything from a phone number to a song. For example, you can capture the image of an email address and automatically add it to your Contacts, or scan a movie and immediately kick off a download. Amazon says third-party app developers including StubHub and iHeartRadio will create apps that leverage Firefly.
4. How will these options impact battery life?
It's not clear yet. Amazon says the phone will have a 2400 mAH battery that can handle up to 22 hours of talk time, 285 hours in standby. It can also handle up to 11 hours of video playback and 65 hours of audio playback. However, Amazon does not detail how sophisticated features like Dynamic Perspective will impact battery life.
5. What about the rest of the smartphone?
Fire boasts a 4.7-inch high-definition display, making it bigger than the iPhone 5s but a bit smaller than the Samsung Galaxy line of smartphones. Other features include LTE support, a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 2.2 GHz processor, 2 GB of RAM, dual stereo speakers and a 13-megapixel rear camera. There's also access to a host of Amazon features such as live tech support service Mayday and Amazon Prime. Consumers who buy the phone will get a free 12 months of Prime included.
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