Amazon Blazes Trail Into Smartphone Market with the Fire

Amazon-Fire-Phone-App-GridAmazon has announced its long-rumoured smartphone, the Fire, unveiling two key innovations – a 3D Dynamic Perspective screen that adds depth to the graphical display, and the Firefly feature that enables the camera to recognise over 100m objects and provide information and actions based on what has been scanned.

At an event in Seattle, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos revealed the phone to audience of reporters and Amazon customers who had applied to be at the launch. When outlining why Amazon had chosen to produce a phone, he pointed to its hardware expertise, the millions of existing customers and the Prime ecosystem that already supports apps, streaming video and music.

The phone, which will be available in the US from 25 July exclusively through AT&T, comes with a 12 month subscription to Amazon Prime, including the newly launched Prime Music service, although the phone will also be able to run third-party music apps such as Spotify and Pandora. Other features include ASAP, which predicatively caches video the phone thinks you may want to watch, and the Mayday video chat help service already found on Kindle Fire.

The two most talked-about features were Firefly and the Dynamic Perspective. Firefly has its own dedicated button on the phone, and enables the camera to detect and recognise telephone numbers, email addresses, movies, books, games and more. The primary function of this is to allow people to instantly buy objects they see in the real world via their Amazon accounts, although Bezos also showed a number of other functions.

Upon scanning a CD, it will allow you to stream the songs via Prime Music or another music app and it can recognise artwork and take you to the Wikipedia page for the piece. The SDK is being made available to developers and Amazon has already worked with companies like MyFitnessPal, who created an app that scans food users point the camera at and tells them the calories.

The Dynamic Perspective display is heavily integrated into the phones functionality, using four low-power infrared cameras to scan users faces and create the 3D effect. It is intended to make one-handed use of the phone easier, using scroll, tilt, swivel and peek motions to enable quicker navigation.

The Dynamic Perspective will augment apps, creating more immersive games and adding new functions like viewing clothes in 3D in the Amazon Shopping app and utilising perspective in maps. Like Firefly, the SDK has been released to developers today to encourage them to build apps that support it, and the presentation included a quote from one developer who claimed it was “so intuitive, I often didnt have to look at documentation”.

“Fire Phone puts everything you love about Amazon in the palm of your hand – instant access to Amazons vast content ecosystem and exclusive features like the Mayday button, ASAP, Second Screen, X-Ray, free unlimited photo storage, and more,” said Bezos. “And this is only the beginning – the most powerful inventions are the ones that empower others to unleash their creativity.”

While the Dynamic Perspective feature was hinted at during the build-up to the unveiling, it is likely to be the Firefly button that is most crucial to the Fires success or failure. Speaking before the event, Cathy Boyle, senior analyst for mobile at eMarketer, said “an Amazon smartphone would be less about profiting from device sales per se and more a way to pocket a larger share of multiple revenue streams”. With the Firefly button creating a seamless link between the real world and Amazons eCommerce services, it seems that it will be Amazons key tool in generating revenue from the Fire.