It's getting hot in here.
Today, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the company's first smartphone, the Fire Phone, which uses four cameras on its front face to create a 3D effect for the user. The technology, called "Dynamic Perspective," tracks a person's head and adjusts the screen accordingly, which could be used in map apps, video games, lock screen backgrounds, and more. While the 3D feature is undoubtedly its biggest innovation, Amazon introduced other services that'll separate its device from Apple's and Samsung's phones.
Firefly recognizes 100 million items.
One of them is Firefly, a feature that lets you photograph different products, like, say, a video game, and it automatically puts it in an Amazon shopping list. But it goes far deeper than that: if you're watching Game of Thrones, you can take a picture of a scene in episode five of season one and Firefly will recognize the series, episode, and scene. “Firefly recognizes 100 million items,” Bezos said. Also, the Mayday feature that was introduced with Amazon's Kindle line makes its way over to the smartphone, and it even has a dedicated button on the side of the device so you can connect with a customer service rep within 15 seconds if you're connected to Wi-Fi. Bezos also demoed how users can tilt the phone to scroll and maneuver through the phone, so their fingers don't ever have to touch the device for many of its uses.
Of course, Amazon wants customers who haven't signed up for Prime not to be deterred, so they're offering a one year subscription of Prime to anyone who buys the phone. That also means that they'll also get unlimited picture storage on Amazon Cloud Drive. Unlimited. For comparison, this destroys Apple's offering: they only give 5GB of free cloud storage).
The phone is coming out July 25th and is exclusive to AT&T, with a 32GB version selling for $199.99 and a 64GB version going for $299.99 on two-year contracts.
Pre-order it here, and check out video of Dynamic Perspective in action.
