Skip to main content

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.

Read More

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Boom, the startup that wants to build supersonic planes, just signed a massive deal with Virgin

Have you heard about Boom? Boom is a relatively new startup that’s aiming to build something pretty crazy. They’re not building an app… or a social network… or even some new gadget for the Kickstarter crowd. Boom wants to build planes. Really, really, really fast planes. Specifically, they’re trying to design and build a supersonic passenger plane that goes 2.2x the speed of sound. If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to shuttle people from New York to London in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5. Sound crazy? I wouldn’t disagree. It’s worth noting that the company is in the very early days for something as intensive, massive, and hugely expensive as designing and producing a passenger aircraft. They’re still working on their first prototype, and hope to fly it by late next year. But it’s also worth noting that the team behind the plane has some serious talent in its blood: the company’s 11 employees have collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts — having worked on thin...

Fun Tools to Translate Your Name into Japanese Calligraphy

Japanese calligraphy is an artistic writing style of the Japanese language. Its Chinese origins can be traced back to the twenty-eighth century BCE. Calligraphy found its way into Japanese culture in 600 CE and is known as the karayo tradition. For Westerners, calligraphy is forever fascinating. However, it takes years to learn how to properly draw the signs. Two basic principles must be known to understand Japanese writing: there are different writing styles and different alphabets. Kaisho for example, is a writing style most commonly used in print media. Tensho on the other hand is used in signatures. Other writing styles are Reisho, Gyosho and Sousho. The alphabets include Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Katakana is used for writing foreign words. It can also serve to highlight words, in analogy to capital letters as we know them from the Roman / Latin alphabet (Romaji in Japanese). Each Kanji character has a meaning of its own, while Hiragana or Katakana characters merely repres...