Phandroid
5 top features of the Amazon Fire Phone
So Amazon just announced the Fire Phone, their first smartphone, but what exactly sets it apart from the pack? Aside from its pseudo-Android Fire OS, the Fire Phone will ship with a number of unique features designed to enhance the user experience by taking advantage of Amazon’s existing retail and digital ecosystem. Here are our 5 favorite features introduced along with the Fire Phone.
Dynamic Perspective
The Amazon Fire Phone has four additional cameras at each corner of the phone’s front display, and they’re not for capturing the perfect #selfie. These cameras, coupled with infrared lighting, are used to track your head in relation to the Fire Phone, creating an experience Amazon dubs Dynamic Perspective.
This pseudo-3D technology allows users to peer into display rather than at it, allowing for immersive functionality that varies depending on the application. In Maps you can peek around objects or reveal Yelp ratings. Images take on a whole new dimension, looking great no matter what angle you are viewing them from. Dynamic Perspective can also be used to trigger a number of functions outside of manipulating the appearance of an app or image, such as tilting the phone to scroll books and web pages.
The best part? Amazon has opened up Dynamic Perspective to developers, meaning the potential exists for many innovative and interesting ways for users to interact with the Fire Phone on a per app basis.
Firefly
Amazon’s Firefly is like Google Goggles on steroids. Using the Fire Phone’s rear camera, Firefly can scan and identify barcodes, book and album covers, works of art and more, presenting the user with more info on any particular item and a relevant Amazon purchase page if available. Essentially, impulse buys start and end with Firefly.
But Firefly isn’t limited to images. No, it can detect audio as well, scanning for music, movies, and television shows as you watch, and, you guessed it, once again offering up items for purchase when possible. Firefly can even scan documents for relevant text such as names, web and email addresses, and phone numbers to quickly create a new contact, send an email, make a call, or launch a web page.
Sure, Amazon likely implemented to feature for its own economic gain, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. A dedicated hardware button to launch Firefly makes it all the better.
Mayday
Amazon has brought the same 24/7 support featured on its line of Kindle Fire tablets to the Fire Phone. Only a tap away, Mayday offers lost users a quick way to solve problems with their device by providing live support from real, breathing human beings around the clock, 365 days a year.
Support is provided by way of video chat with the additional benefit of allowing an Amazon customer support representative draw directly on the screen to provide detailed instructions. With a promised response time of 15 seconds or less, Mayday looks to be a big help to inexperienced smartphone users.
Amazon Prime
You can’t talk about an Amazon device without talking about the Amazon ecosystem, and an included 12-month Amazon Prime subscription makes sure users have plenty of content to take in. Amazon Prime has long offered a growing library of video content — including movies and TV shows — while a newly implemented music streaming service provides even more entertainment options.
On top of Amazon content, the Fire Phone offers new ways of interacting with media, whether it be the X-Ray feature that provides info like song lyrics and IMDb-sourced trivia. And the Fire Phone fits right in with the rest of Amazon’s product line, allowing users to pick up right where the left off on their Kindle tablet or Fire TV.
Unlimited cloud storage for photos
The Amazon Fire Phone promises a great photo experience with its advanced 13MP camera, but what to do with all those gorgeous hi-res images? All Fire Phone owners are being treated to unlimited cloud photo storage, a nice touch that will help keep users photo libraries in tact and organized while allowing internal storage space to be used for other purposes — like all those movies, songs, and games.
Want to know more?
While those are the features everyone will be talking about, in reality these five items only deal with a small portion of what the Amazon Fire Phone is capable of. If you are considering the Fire Phone as your next device, we recommend you check out our comparison with other top Android smartphones on the market. Be sure to check out the new Fire Phone section over at Android Forums and keep it tuned to Phandroid for more coverage.
The Fire Phone is the most expensive way to get a year of Amazon Prime
You may still basking in the afterglow of a new phone announcement, but there are a lot of details to go over. One of the things that may have been overlooked is the Amazon Prime promotion. For a limited time Amazon will be throwing in free year of Prime if you buy the Fire Phone. If you’ve ever wanted Prime this is the most expensive way to get it.
Here’s the deal: your free year of Prime begins when you go through the set-up process on your new Fire Phone. It starts immediately and ends a full year later. Existing Prime subscribers will have the free year tacked on to the end of their current year. Once your current paid year ends the new free one will begin. If you return your Fire Phone your free Prime subscription will be cancelled. If you have more questions check out the FAQ.
Prime is a great service if you buy a lot of stuff from Amazon. You get free two-day shipping on most items, access to streaming movies and TV shows, plus their new music service. If you’re interested in trying Prime for free without a Fire Phone you can do so for one month, and $99 per year after that. It’s a great deal.
Twitter finally adds GIF support for Android, iOS, and the web
No matter how you want to pronounce it (it’s s hard “G,” by the way), I think we can all agree that GIFs general make our social networks a little more fun. We’re not sure what took so long, but in a back-end update to Twitter on both the web and its mobile apps, the microblogging network now officially supports GIFs.
Starting today, you can share and view animated GIFs on http://t.co/wJD8Fp317i, Android and iPhone. http://t.co/XBrAbOm4Ya — Twitter Support (@Support) June 18, 2014
This means you can upload these moving pictures using the native Twitter client and watch as they animate in the app. To be clear, GIFs wont load while in the timeline view (in an effort to not eat up all your data), only when clicking on a tweet to view it’s media will you be presented with the moving GIF. And move, they shall.
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