Amazon’s Fire Phone let’s you see the world with 'Firefly'
MANILA, Philippines - Amazon sets the bar high for other competitors as it introduces its first ever smartphone, Fire Phone, which features “Firefly,†a ground-breaking app that lets you scan the world around you and lets you buy it by just whipping out your camera.
The app is set off via “Firefly†button on the Fire Phone, which just proves that Amazon is certainly bringing people into its innovative world where everything can be identified and ordered.
This pioneering technology allows you to scan items such as barcodes of household goods, book covers, and DVD covers.
Another standout feature is the Shazam-like audio recognition-component, which lets you identify songs you are listening to and recognize and access shows, even down to the individual episodes of the shows.
Firefly will directly hook you into Amazon’s online store so you can instantaneously buy items in just a blink of an eye.
According to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the phone can scan up to 100 million objects and takes less than a second to work. That includes approximately 245,000 movies and TV episodes, 160 live TV channels, 35 million songs, and 70 million products.
On a larger scale, it can be said that Firefly’s goal is to help people find what they want to purchase. However, Firefly does not just dwell on that purpose. It also promotes semantic advancement by smartly identifying phone numbers using image-to-text conversion and even determining if a phone number is non-existent.
It can work on signs, posters, magazines, or business cards, as well. Moreover, it lets you send emails, save as a contact, or go to a website without typing a URL. Firefly can also distinguish an art or picture, and then automatically look it up on Wikipedia entry, which is something Apple’s Siri and Google cannot do.
At some point, Firefly seems to be the evolution of the “Flow†feature, Amazon’s visual-recognition technology that used to exist in its own separate mobile app.
Auspiciously, third-party developers are allowed to tap into the service through an all-new SDK, meaning third-parties can put in their features to promote their own.
MyFitnessPal, Vino, iHeartRadio, and StubHub already grabbed the opportunity to access the range of capabilities of Firefly.
Fire Phone’s pre-order has already started. Shipping starts on July 25, exclusively through AT&T. A 32GB model costs $199 with a two-year contract, the same price as other high-end smartphones. A 64GB model is also available for $299 with a contract or $749 without.
The phone includes a year of Amazon Prime service. Recommendations for music and movies to buy are displayed on the home screen to keep you updated. Furthermore, it can also become a remote control on a Fire TV.
If all of these features really work in the real world, the way Bezos promises it will, it is going to be bizarrely clever and ultramodern at once.
Other phone features include:
Qualcomm snapdragon 800 quad-core processor
HD display
gorilla glass, scratch-resistant screen.
3D user interface
1280 x 720 pixel IPS display with 590 nits of brightness for outdoor visibility
2GB of RAM
13MP rear camera with a 5 element lens and optical image stabilization
dual stereo speakers
2.1MP front-facing camera
802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth, and NFC
