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Amazon announces the Fire Phone, $199 with 2-year contract for 32GB



Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has just announced the company's first-ever smartphone, the Fire Phone, at a private event in Seattle. The device is the latest in a growing family of Amazon hardware that includes the Kindle Fire tablets and the Fire TV set-top box. The phone is exclusive to AT&T, and will cost $199 with a two-year contract for a 32GB device and $299 for a 64GB device. The phone will cost $650 off-contract, which is common for high-end smartphones. Amazon's product page indicates that it's available for pre-order now, and will begin shipping to buyers on July 25. For a "limited time," a full year of Amazon Prime membership is included with purchase.

The phone has a 4.7-inch IPS display with 590 nits maximum brightness and a 1280×720 resolution, giving it a density of 315PPI. This isn't the biggest or highest-resolution phone there is, but Amazon says it has been "optimized for one-handed use." The phone has a rubberized frame, a glass back, anodized aluminum buttons, and Gorilla Glass 3 protecting the display from scratches and other damage. The phone is 0.35 inches (8.9mm) thick and weighs 5.64 ounces (160 grams).

The phone's most-hyped capability, of course, is its motion-tracking screen—four cameras on the front of the device track your head as you move it around, along with infrared lights to make sure the feature works even in dark rooms. You can move and tilt the phone to shift the contents of the display (images, maps, and so on), subtly creating a glasses-free 3D effect that doesn't rely on the user keeping their head or eyes in a particular position. The phone will let you flip through images and scroll through Web pages by slightly tilting the device, rather than relying solely on finger input. A third-party SDK is available so that developers can add this "dynamic perspective" feature to their own apps.

On the inside, the phone is suitably high-end: it uses a quad-core 2.2GHz SoC with an Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB of RAM—according to Amazon's product page, the phone uses a Snapdragon 800. It uses a 2,400mAh battery that Amazon says will deliver up to 11 hours of video playback, and it includes 802.11ac Wi-Fi. The Fire OS 3.5.0 operating system is a newer version of the Android-derived OS that powers the Kindle Fire HDX tablets.

It's got a 13MP camera with a f/2.0, five-element lens and optical image stabilization that sounds pretty good on paper, though, of course, we'll need to get our hands on the thing before we know exactly how good its pictures are. A dedicated shutter button like the one found on Windows phones will automatically open the camera app and take pictures for you, and Bezos boasted that buyers will get free unlimited photo storage via Amazon Cloud Drive.

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