Amazon Fire Phone shops for Prime customers with 4.7-inch screen, rubber body, Firefly shopping app

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” in Amazon’s previous plans, from the Kindle to the Kindle Fire tablet. The new Amazon phone is targeted for Amazon Prime customers. And it seems a lot like a Kindle Fire, in phone form.

A closer look at the Amazon Fire phone (pictures)
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The Fire Phone has high-end specs: a 4.7 inch IPS LCD HD display, covered in Gorilla Glass 3, at 590 nits with a circular polarizer for clear landscape and portrait viewing. The phone is covered in a rubber frame, and has steel connectors to prevent “USB wobble.” Magnetic headphones are included, and Dolby Digital Plus virtual surround sound promises extra oomph.

Specs galore

It’s also no slouch in specs: quad-core 2.2 GHz 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.

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 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, 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.

Firefly will 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 being sold as a central perk of the Fire Phone. And an SDK is angling 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’s 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 it via an array of infrared cameras studded throughout the Fire Phone.

Images can be zoomed-in on by tilting. 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.

It’s been around on other phones, and hasn’t always been so hot. Maybe Amazon’s implementation will be better. Jeff Bezos did display using Dynamic Perspective in gaming, offering a 3D-like way of playing games, one of the more intriguing uses of this type of shifting-perspective control.

It’s truly unique and over-the-top camera tech: this type of perspective control happens via 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 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?

It looks like AT&T will offer the Fire Phone for $199 with 32GB storage, or $299 with 64GB storage, based on store links leaked from AT&T’s web site.

More to come. Follow our live blog for the latest.