Amazon Launches Fire Phone, Ignites the Smartphone Market

Here are some of the things that make Amazon’s Fire Phone a unique beast among the thousands of smartphones available on today’s market.

The Seattle-based e-tailer had to implement some unique features into the Fire Phone, in order to ensure its success and survival on the market. Below are some of the aspects that should increase people’s appeal for the Amazon Fire Phone over the competitors’ offers.

At the event hosted by Amazon at Fremont Studios in Seattle, Jeff Bezos made sure that everyone understands that the Firefly app is the feature that’s placed center-stage. As always, it’s not the hardware that’s the most important for Amazon, but the software ecosystem that it creates, and the integration of Amazon services so that they perfectly complement the hardware.

Firefly is the equivalent of Shazam for everything Amazon-related. It can identify songs, and then take you to the Amazon page belonging to the album, but it goes way beyond that. Once you point the camera at a phone number or a bar code, Firefly detects it and lets you interact with it accordingly.

More than that, it can detect movies and TV shows, so if you like it, you could think of it as Shazam for video content.

Luckily, if you happen to be in a hurry, you don’t need to unlock the screen and go through the app drawer to launch Firefly. Amazon gave that some thought and added a Firefly button to the Fire Phone. In other words, it takes just one second to access more than 100 million items from the e-tailer’s website.

In case you need help while using the Fire Phone, you are encouraged to launch the Mayday app that will get you in touch with a customer support representative right away. Now that’s what I call a company that cares about its clients!

Of course, the 3D effects are also important, as they’re done in a unique way. The four cameras that adorn the corners of the 4.7″ display detect the position of your head and eyes, and adjust the displayed content accordingly, so that it seems 3D at all times.

Fire Phone users will also get one year of Amazon Prime at no additional cost. That means that they can access Prime Music, Prime Instant Video, and Kindle books a lot faster than typical Amazon customers.

The e-tailer sweetened the deal even more by offering unlimited photo storage in the Amazon cloud drive. If you like shooting a lot of photos, this will definitely be up your alley.

The Fire Phone will be available on July 25 on AT&T exclusively, at least for the time being. The 32GB version will cost $200, while the 64GB one will be $300, both of them with two-year contracts. That being said, would you consider buying one?

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