Amazon Fire aims to disrupt smartphone market

Amazon has finally taken the wraps off its new Fire Phone. The 4.7-inch LTE Android phone will be an AT&T exclusive, available July 25 on contract at $199 for the 32GB version and $299 for the 64GB version.
Like another phone that started off with AT&T, the iPhone, Amazon’s Fire is clearly positioned as a game changer. It includes several features that have not been part of any previous smartphone. Software called Firefly uses the phone’s 13 megapixel rear facing camera in a new way, recognizing images of more than 70 million objects. These images can then be displayed on the phone’s screen, and of course the next step is an option to buy the item on Amazon, if possible.
The Fire also has a feature called ASAP that predicts which movies and TV episodes a user will want to watch, then downloads them and caches them so they are ready to watch. AT&T will almost certainly be able to manage these downloads in a way that uses network resources as efficiently as possible, meaning that users will get their videos with less buffering.
The Fire is also the first smartphone to include the Mayday help feature, which first debuted on Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets. Mayday is now available over 3G and 4G as well as Wi-Fi. Users will be able to summon a live person to help them use their Fire phones 24/7. Amazon’s response time goal for Mayday is 15 seconds or less.
On the hardware side, the phone is perhaps less groundbreaking but still innovative. The Fire has Gorilla Glass on both sides, and comes with magnetic earbuds attached to flattened cords that Amazon says will resist tangling. The 13 megapixel rear-facing camera has backside illumination, an f/2.0 lens, and optical image stabilization. The processor is fairly standard for a high-end LTE phone, clocked at 2.2 GHz. Amazon did not disclose the chip’s manufacturer, but teardown analysts tell RCR that they are ready to get to work on the Fire Phone.
Finally, Amazon is offering Fire buyers free unlimited cloud storage for photos, and easy integration with the Fire TV, for those that want to go all-in with Amazon.
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