As expected, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has unveiled its new smartphone, which it’s calling the Fire phone. This handset has been under development for years, and we’ve heard numerous rumors about it over the last couple of years. As Amazon’s big event got underway this afternoon, shares of the company’s stock gradually started edging upward.
Amazon shows off the Fire phone
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is calling its first smartphone the Fire phone so that it will fit in with its Kindle Fire tablets. The operating system the smartphone uses is similar to that in the Kindle Fire tablets. Amazon is offering apps through the Amazon Appstore.
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos showed off the new handset. He said they are bringing over a number of the features they’ve included in the Fire TV “ASAP.” Management says they’ve built up the Prime ecosystem as well and that it will play a key role in the Fire phone. They launched Prime Music, which contains a million songs and will be on the Fire phone. Amazon is also including Second Screen and X-ray to the phone, making it possible for users to fling videos to any Miracast device, including the Fire TV. Other features include a rubberized frame, Gorilla Glass, CNC aluminum buttons, and more.
The Fire phone’s specs
As expected, the Fire phone has a number of sensors and four front-facing cameras. They are designed to closely track the user’s head and create a number of 3D effects while also adding gesture control capabilities. The Fire phone has a quad-core Snapdragon processor made by QUALCOMM, Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM) and a 4.7-inch display. It also has 2 GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel rear camera and a front-facing camera that can be used for video chats. The cameras feature optical image stabilization as well.
In all, the handset has a total of six different camera modules. That’s by far the most of any smartphone on the market. Four of them are low-power modules, however. Those are the ones that track head movements.
Amazon has more
After unveiling the Fire phone, they brought some other products as well. Bezos showed off something called Firefly, which is included on the Fire phone and uses a camera to recognize a number of things, like books, phone numbers, CDs, URLs, bar codes, games, QR codes and more. It then finds those things in its database and can pull them up. Firefly is also able to listen to requests as well. In addition to pulling up information about them, users can also click to buy them.
