Finally and after much anticipation (more than two years of rumors) Amazon has been encouraged to present its first smartphone under the name of Fire Phone. At first it was believed that the new terminal would be a rival to the iPhone since it would offer a good smartphone at a great price. The point is that this is not the case and the terminal has been announced by $ 649 with 32GB of storage and $ 749 with 64GB of storage. Once you read this, you already know that Amazon has no plans to take the world of smartphones ahead, far from it.
Going into the specs, this is a great terminal. Among its highlights we value a screen of 4.7 inch HD with Gorilla Glass 3. The screen also features 590 nits of brightness and a high degree of contrast to help you with viewing during the day. Highlighting its most striking characteristics, we continue with the autonomy, which in this case is quite good. Specifically according to Amazon the Fire Phone offers us 11 hours of video playback y 22 hours of conversation, more than good figures for the current panorama.
The computer processor is quad core and runs at 2.2 GHz, has 2 GB of RAM and implements a main camera of 13 megapixels with an aperture of f / 2.0, video recording in Full HD and optical image stabilizer. As a highlight in the photographic section, Amazon will offer its customers free online photo storage, something that is interesting for those who take hundreds of photos regularly.
Obviously it is a terminal with support for global LTE connectivity and for audio it has Virtual Dolby Digital Plus to hear your music and videos more clearly. Another interesting point of the terminal is the integration of the Mayday service. Mayday is a service that Amazon debuted with its latest tablets and that allows you to call the technical service of the house by videoconference and have it solve any questions or problems you may have with your terminal.
As to rumored 3D effect, the terminal will effectively have four front cameras which will act as sensors. With these sensors the Fire Phone will be able to offer us a "parallax" effect very similar to 3D and it will allow us to navigate through the terminal using only our eyes or our gestures, something like the technology that Samsung presented with its Galaxy S4 and that practically no one uses since in the long run it is uncomfortable at least.
At the same time, another novelty that comes to us from the Fire Phone is the integration of a new functionality that bears the name of FireFly. This functionality that has a dedicated physical button consists of using the Fire Phone camera to recognize all kinds of products. Specifically, you can examine QR codes, barcodes, DVDs, CDs, games, URLs and even music with the terminal. This recognition scans more than 100 million products and if it is available on Amazon the product offers you the option to buy or download it.
This last functionality seems great to me and a great idea on the part of Amazon to monetize its users. However, considering the price of the equipment, it is unlikely that this functionality will achieve wide adoption. Personally I would have put the smartphone in a range of 200 to 300 dollars / euros I remove the unnecessary 3D effect, I keep the rest of the specifications as well as the FireFly button. Even if the company sold the terminal at cost price, it would earn a lot of money in the sale of products through its store since the terminal would reach a much wider audience than a $ 649 terminal can reach for a company that does not have Experience in the sector.
It is clear by now that the Fire Phone will hardly compete with the top of the Android range, much less with Apple's iPhones. And it is that, although it is in the same price range, it is very difficult to believe that Amazon is going to be successful with this proposal. But hey, you never know, it's still a mass success, right?
