Amazon Fire Phone

in mobile on 2014-06-18 19:25 (#3P4)

Today, Amazon revealed the Fire Phone , its new Amazon branded phone. The device sports a quad-core 2.2GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB or 64GB storage, and a 13MP back-facing camera. Although the 4.7 inch screen is not actually 3D, a matrix of four front-facing cameras track your movements to alter your prospective.

What makes this an Amazon phone and not just another Android phone? Well, for starters, there is a dedicated hardware button to launch Firefly - Amazon's version of Eden-of-the-East - that can snap a picture and identify nearly any product and then link to the Amazon page. In short, it makes it really easy to buy things on Amazon. Also, Amazon is offering unlimited photo storage in the cloud. Together with Amazon Prime's new streaming video and music features, they seem to be really pushing the "Everything to the cloud!" approach.

skeptical (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-06-19 09:06 (#264)

Yeah, I'm skeptical too. They're either thinking "this can be a white box, generic phone sold by a company people like to buy from," or they're thinking "this will increase sales of Amazon products." If it's the latter, the obvious question is, "why not just an app anyone can run on their existing phone?" More likely, this is going to try to position itself as a media consuming pipeline between your pocket and Amazon's cloud services, providing easy access to movies and music, kind of like a "KindleFireTV for your pocket."

I'm not bullish on this one, though.

[sigh] I remember when the Internet was an open platform, level playing field. Now between Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google, you scarcely have any reason to visit anywhere else on the web whatsoever. Oh yeah, Facebook [yawn].