Amazon has introduced a new smartphone that will be closely tied to the products and services it sells, while adding such touches as the ability to render images in 3-D.
The Fire phone was announced Wednesday and will start shipping in July. Until then, here are some details on the new Fire phone:
Audio and Object Recognition
With a new Firefly feature, snap a photo of a book, and it'll show you where to buy it. Listen to a song playing in the background, and it'll direct you to that tune on Amazon. It can even direct you to knowledge, such as pulling up a Wikipedia entry on a painting you snapped. The feature will also let you snap bar codes, email addresses, phone numbers and more.
This concept isn't entirely new. Sony, for instance, has a tool for getting information over the Internet by snapping a bar code or a landmark. Firefly goes further, though, by incorporating audio recognition.
3-D Images
You can rotate the phone and get a different view depending on your angle of vision. CEO Jeff Bezos calls this "dynamic perspective" and said the phone is basically redrawing the image 60 times per second. To make that happen, the phone has four front-facing infrared cameras to tell where your head is, even if your fingers happen to cover two of them.
You can use this feature, for instance, to get front and back views of a dress you are thinking of buying. You can take a character's viewpoint in games by moving your head to look around.
Taking Photos
Beyond the four infrared cameras, there's a regular, 2-megapixel camera on the front for selfies and a 13-megapixel camera on the back. That's standard for phones these days.
The rear camera has image stabilization to counteract shaking as people take shots, something available in other phones as well.
Amazon is offering unlimited free storage of photos taken with the Fire on its Cloud Drive service.
Other Details
At 4.7-inches, as measured diagonally, the screen is smaller than leading Android phone, but larger than Apple's iPhone. Bezos calls the Fire's screen ideal for one-handed use.
The phone will come with earbuds that have flat cords and magnets to clasp them together, so tangled cords will be history.
There's an auto-scroll feature that lets you scroll down website articles or books by tilting the phone. Samsung's Galaxy phones have that, too.
Availability
AT&T will be the exclusive carrier. The phone will be available July 25. People can start ordering them Wednesday at $200 for a base model with 32 gigabytes and $300 for 64 gigabytes. Both require two-year service contracts.
The phone comes with 12 months of Prime membership, which is normally $99 a year. Existing Prime members will get their term extended.
Not a First
Facebook once tried to release a phone tied to its services. The HTC First, released in April 2013, came with Facebook's Home software, which takes over the phone's front screen to present status updates, messages and other content. Both the phone and the software flopped.
Google also has its own phones under the Nexus brand, mostly to showcase its Android operating system. Google makes Android available for free for any phone manufacturer to use and modify. That makes it difficult to know what's really Android and what's a modification.
Amazon's Bezos: Fire phone offers 'something different'
By Ryan Nakashima and Anick Jesdanun, Associated Press
There are two ways to view the smartphone Amazon introduced to the world on Wednesday: It's either the latest in a long line of phones with fancy features many people will never use or a magic wand for shopaholics.
The phone's most significant feature, called "Firefly," employs audio and object recognition technology to identify products and present the user with ways to purchase the items through Amazon. Users can simply snap a photo of a book, for instance, and Firefly will offer up its title and author, give more information about it and provide ways to buy it through Amazon with a single click.
Seven years after Apple's iPhone took over the category, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos believes there is room in the market for something different. Even with the dominant leads that Apple and Samsung hold, Bezos told The Associated Press in an interview, "it's still early" in the wireless device business.
People change phones all the time, he said. It's not about taking market share right away, but making a phone that is ideal for a certain customer and hoping it takes hold.
"We wanted to make a device that's great for one person," Bezos said. "It's like a certain person likes chocolate and another person likes vanilla. The customer can choose."
While the new Fire Phone comes with some features that are practically industry standard - like a slim profile, a sturdy glass touchscreen, minimalist buttons and one camera for facing toward and away from the user- it breaks new ground in other areas.
The phone's Firefly object recognition feature can identify items and product names captured with the device's camera. It can also pull in useful information such as phone numbers, website addresses. The company has catalogued more than a hundred million items that Firefly can recognize and has tweaked the technology to recognize words and characters in a variety of real-life situations.
Another feature, called "dynamic perspective," uses four infrared, front-facing cameras that tell the phone where the user's face and eyes are located. The feature adjusts the user interface so that tilting the screen relative to the viewer's face can toggle through screens, scroll through websites, make online video game characters fly up or down, and render buildings and other custom-made art in 3-D.
The entry-level Fire phone costs $199 with a two-year AT&T contract, which places it at the high end of smartphone pricing. But the phone comes with 32 gigabytes of memory, double the standard 16 GB. It also comes with 12 months of Amazon Prime, the company's free shipping, video, music and book subscription plan, which normally costs $99 a year.
"This is a very aggressive price point for a premium phone," Bezos said.
The new device fits with Amazon's broader aim to create a more efficient shopping experience while steering more consumers to its retail products.
"It goes back to the mission of Amazon, which is to sell you stuff," said Ramon Llamas of the research firm IDC. "It reduces the number of steps it takes to buy things on the phone."
Fire also comes with a 4.7-inch screen, suitable for using with one hand, and earbuds with flat cords and magnets that are designed to eliminate tangles.
Persuading consumers to buy the Fire over an iPhone or Samsung phone will be tough, analysts say, particularly because Amazon isn't offering price breaks the way it has with Kindle tablets. And sophisticated technology such as 3-D will appeal primarily to early adopters of technology.
"The technology's cool, but consumers don't buy technology," said Julie Ask, an analyst at Forrester Research. "We buy solutions. We buy services. We pay for things that make our lives easier."
Charles Golvin, founder of Abelian Research, believes the phone will appeal mostly to people who already use Amazon services heavily.
"Any loyalist of iPhones or Google is going to have to judge whether there's enough value in what Amazon is offering with Fire to make the transition," he said.
Samsung and Apple dominate worldwide smartphone sales with a combined 46 percent share, according to IDC. And in the U.S., Apple leads with more than 37 percent, with Samsung at nearly 29 percent.
Amazon could succeed even if it doesn't steal market share from the top phone makers. Michael Scanlon, managing director with John Hancock Asset Management, said success will be measured by whether Amazon can increase loyalty among its Amazon Prime members and get them to boost purchases.
Amazon is giving Fire owners a free year of membership, which normally costs $99, and existing subscribers an extra 12 months of membership. Prime offers free two-day shipping, encouraging impulse purchases. It also offers free access to some movies, TV shows, music and books and could encourage consumers to buy additional content, once they are used to the offerings.
Meanwhile, Firefly could encourage more purchases. The feature lets you snap bar codes, phone numbers and more. It can even direct you to facts and data, such as a Wikipedia entry with information about a painting you snapped. It listens to songs, TV shows and movies and can pull up extra info like lyrics, actor bios and other information through its IMDb database.
The phone will be available July 25 in the U.S. exclusively through AT&T. People were able to start ordering it Wednesday.
AP Review: Amazon phone watches you watch it
By Ryan Nakashima, AP Business Writer
Amazon set out to do something different with the unveiling of its first smartphone Wednesday. How about a completely new way of interacting with your phone, for starters?
As part of the showcase of its brand new "Fire Phone," Amazon.com Inc. took the wraps off a feature it calls "dynamic perspective." Turns out, it's more than just a gimmick that allows you to see in 3-D.
The feature makes use of four infrared cameras pointed at your face that help judge whether you're looking at the screen straight-on, at an angle and how close you are to the screen. The phone can then adjust the image accordingly. That gives you the ability to see depth in images, to see around objects in the foreground, to zoom in for a better look, and to toggle through websites, books and menus and even to play games by tilting the phone back and forth and up and down while you look at it.
Another feature called "Firefly" brings what's known as augmented reality to life in a new way, by turning your phone into a powerful tool that recognizes book covers, CDs, DVDs, songs, movies, grocery items, phone numbers and websites and pulls them into the phone so you can take action.
For Amazon, the major benefit of this is that it takes price comparison shopping to a new level, because any item you see while walking down the aisle of a Walmart or Target can get an instant price check. Amazon says the phone can recognize more than a hundred million items. And if you link your credit card information to the service, you can make a purchase with a couple taps.
But more than that, by releasing these tools to developers, Amazon has made what could be a major contribution to what a smartphone can do.
With about a half hour to try out these features and have them explained in depth, I was both impressed and saw some flaws.
The 3-D effect is quite stunning. Just imagine looking down a long hallway and putting your ear against each wall one after the other. Your perspective changes and straight lines will seem to disappear to a different point. To demonstrate the effect on the phone, Amazon made available a bunch of lock-screen images, like the cartoon ruins of a pyramid, some hot-air balloons and a jungle setting. Swiveling the phone around makes it seem like the images had a depth of an inch or two, allowing you to look around and beyond objects in the foreground.
It's a neat party trick but the tool has other uses. Amazon demonstrated an early version of how the feature is used in an app by the real estate website Zillow, for example. After zooming in on an interior photo, the app then allows you to change your perspective of what you're looking at inside the room. Sure, it was a bit grainy, and the image wasn't rendered in 3-D, but it showed the promise of what's possible.
Games also made use of the tool. One game allowed you to control whether the figure flew up or down based on essentially nodding your head or making the phone lie flat or upright. Another game, called Tofu Fury, allows you to get a 3-D perspective on the game level. It still essentially plays like Angry Birds, but it did something I've never seen before in a game.
One other neat thing: it does all this in relation to your face. So you could do this lying in bed or hanging upside down. I tried it out, taking a deep bow. The aforementioned game flew just the same depending on where the phone was to my face.
Where the feature needs work, I felt, was in its ability to control menus and scroll through text. Quick side swivels brought up hidden menus on certain screens. Like on the music screen, a quick swivel to the left brought up a panel from the right side that showed song lyrics. A quick swivel while in the second-screen TV watching app, X-Ray, toggled between character photos when they were in costume and in street clothes. In the maps app, a quick swivel brought up local Yelp listings for restaurants. When on a website, tilting the phone away from you makes the words scroll up. Tilt it more, and they move even faster.
In a way, these operational functions made me feel uneasy because I don't want to necessarily keep my head still while using my phone all the time, or set off unintended actions. And these things were definitely possible. While looking at a product image on the Amazon store app of a bottled product that was identified using Firefly, the image erratically jumped between big and small. I just wanted it to stop.
This phone has other features, and basically it's very nicely built. It has a solid heft in the hand while not being heavy at all. The buttons, which can activate the camera or Firefly from a cold start, are minimalist and comfortable. The 4.7-inch screen with a 16:9 aspect ratio is just right for holding and controlling with one hand. There are speakers on top and bottom for stereo sound when holding the phone sideways.
And it is packed with many of the features that Kindle Fire tablet users are familiar with, such as its Mayday live-help function. It is a tool for reaping all of the benefits of a $99-a-year Amazon Prime membership, from video watching to music listening to book reading. And you get one year of Prime for free.
Yet it's the dynamic perspective feature that, in my view, changes smartphones forever. It's one that others may try to copy, and I think it opens up a world of possibilities for app developers.
Before the event, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sent all attendees a copy of his favorite children's book, "Mr. Pine's Purple House." The moral of the story is that it's good to be different sometimes.
In an interview with The Associated Press after the event, Bezos responded to several questions surrounding Amazon's late entry into smartphones and the dominance of existing players like Apple and Samsung. Bezos rebutted: "Taken to its logical extension, you could never have new entrants in anything," and laughed with his signature guffaw.
This is a purple house and inside there are 3-D images in floating picture frames of tofu sculptures suspended by hot-air balloons. Many people will want to live there and it's absolutely worth taking a tour.