Amazon Fire Phone: Firefly shopping, dynamic 3D effects, coming July 25 for $199 (hands-on)

Amazon has a phone. And it is called the Fire Phone.

At Amazon’s event today, CEO Jeff Bezos focused on the impact of “new hardware” on Amazon’s previous plans, from the Kindle to the Kindle Fire tablet. The new Amazon Fire Phone is designed to be especially useful for Amazon Prime customers. And it seems a lot like a Kindle Fire, in phone form. But it has a few special features — a universal scanning app, and a crazy set of infrared cameras that create 3D-like phone navigation — that could set it apart from the competition.

Design

The Fire Phone doesn’t look particularly different from other smartphones: it’s covered in a rubber frame, has a Gorilla Glass-covered screen, and has little Amazon-touted touches like steel connectors to prevent “USB wobble.” Magnetic headphones are included, and Dolby Digital Plus virtual surround sound promises extra oomph.

In some brief initial hands-on time, CNET’s Jessica Dolcourt thought the Fire Phone felt slightly rubberized all around, while the corners felt a little sharp where the back of the Fire Phone meets its spine: the phone’s slick back is made of glass, a nice touch. Still, according to Dolcourt, the Fire Phone has an overall look that doesn’t stand out.

Interface, and early hands-on impressions

As Dolcourt continued using the Fire Phone, she immediately noticed the buttons: one button doubles as camera shutter and Firefly access. You press for camera, or hold for Firefly, Amazon’s new scanning-and-shopping app. Cameras are very visible throughout the Fire Phone’s external design: three on top, two on bottom, and one on back.

Tilt to scroll, part of Amazon’s new dynamic camera-assisted interface, is responsive, but occasionally might be weird if you accidentally gesture, according to Dolcourt. Dynamic perspective on maps seem to work as advertised: Jessica Dolcourt looked up the Space Needle on Amazon’s Nokia Here-powered maps app, and according to her it was very responsive, with no delay.

The Home key controls shuttling through other parts of the interface: press once for start screen carousel, and again for the app tray, which is divided by what’s stored on device and what’s stored in the cloud. Press and hold the Home key, and you get the voice assistant, much the same as what’s on Amazon Fire TV. It also handles dictation for email, text, and other app functions.

You swipe down from the top for system access and notifications. From the home screen, swipe right from the left side pulls up shortcuts for apps, games, web, pictures, audiobooks, shopping, and Prime. Mayday, Amazon’s customer-service access, is a software button you can access from the pull down menu, along with a flashlight soft key.

See the video below for extra details, and stay tuned for more of Dolcourt’s on-site impressions.

Specs: Leaning to high-end

The Fire Phone has some fair to high-end specs: a 4.7-inch IPS LCD HD display, at 590 nits, with a circular polarizer for clear landscape and portrait viewing. But the Fire Phone’s screen has only a 1,280×720-pixel resolution, lower than recent higher-end smartphones. It’s equivalent to the resolution of last year’s Moto X from Motorola.

Inside it holds a quad-core 2.2GHz processor, Adreno 330 graphics, and 2GB of RAM. And it has a 13MP rear-facing camera, a f/2.0 five element lens, and optical image stabilization.

The Fire Phone has NFC, but lacks Bluetooth 4.0, which could mean it won’t play nicely with wearables.

Benefits for Prime members will be the real draw: the Fire Phone has unlimited storage for photos via Amazon Prime. And Kindle features like Second Screen and X-Ray will be included, as you’d expect.

Amazon’s Fire Phone won’t be traditional Android, but we at least know that HBO, Netflix, ESPN ScoreCenter, YouTube and Showtime Anytime are among the first video apps to be available on the Fire Phone.

Firefly: The killer app?

A new app that’s first to Fire Phone is Firefly, an app that recognizes QR codes, scans items, recognizes music and audio tracks like Shazam does, and acts as an everday shopping-scanner. It can even recognize the audio on TV shows, and pull up information via IMDB (which Amazon owns). Or it could recognize art. Third-party apps attempt to do these things already on iOS and Android, but this looks like a universal Amazon reality-scanner…for shopping, or otherwise.

Amazon says Firefly can read phone numbers written on a piece of paper and call them, recognize addresses, and a lot more, using “semantic boosting” to supposedly eliminate noise from information.

There’s a dedicated Firefly button on the Fire Phone, which underlines how much Firefly is intended to be a central selling point of the Fire Phone. And there’s an SDK to encourage third-party app development to take advantage of Firefly: already, iHeartRadio, MyFitnessPal, and Vivino, a wine database, have been working on tapping Firefly to work with their own databases.

Dynamic perspective: Fire Phone 3D and magic camera system

The Fire Phone doesn’t have a true glasses-free 3D display, but engages in sensor- and camera-driven “dynamic perspective” that makes objects look practically 3D when the phone is tilted and moved around. And it does that via an array of infrared cameras studded throughout the Fire Phone.

Tilting the phone can zoom in on images. Maps will show 3D landmarks that can be tilted and “moved” around. And a new feature called autoscroll lets you tilt to scroll up or down. For books, yes, it means tilting for infinite scrolling.

Other phones have attempted to give a 3D experience, and it hasn’t always been so hot. Maybe Amazon’s implementation will be better. Jeff Bezos did demonstrate what Dynamic Perspective looks like in gaming, one of the more intriguing uses of this type of shifting-perspective control.

It’s truly unique and over-the-top camera tech. This perspective control is made possible by a unique array of cameras on the Fire Phone, specifically engineered to measure depth and range of motion: there are four corner cameras and a center camera, with infrared, with global shutters. This is a lot like having a Kinect stuck on the front of your phone.

UI: Different, in a sense

Amazon’s Fire Phone UI seems a bit like Android, but the different blades for calendar, photos, and music seem a lot more direct and friendly, focused on a clean sort of design. Hard to tell right now, but it does seem like a hybrid of Fire tablet and Android phone.

Price and availability

AT&T will offer the Fire Phone exclusively, for a price not much different from other phones: $199 with 32GB storage, or $299 with 64GB storage, with a two-year contract. Unsubsidized prices in the U.S. are $649 and $749, respectively. It’ll be available July 25. Prime customers won’t get any special discounts, but at least you’ll get more Prime: a free year is included with purchase, and will be added to your account if you already subscribe.

The Fire Phone is available for preorder starting today.

Stay tuned for CNET’s hands-on with the Fire Phone in Seattle, and a whole lot more. Meanwhile, read a transcript of the entire event on CNET’s live blog.