Amazon’s Fire Phone: the retail giant jumps into the mobile market – The Verge

Amazon exec says ‘we didn’t get the price right’ on the Fire Phone

2014-10-30T20:59:33-04:00

Hindsight is 20-20, something Amazon now has about the launch of its first smartphone. Amazon debuted the $199 Fire Phone in June, though trimmed the price of the device to 99 cents (with a two-year contract) just two months after it went on sale, without explanation. Speaking to Fortune, Amazon's senior vice president of devices David Limp now says the company simply whiffed on the pricing. "We didn't get the price right," Limp said. "I think people come to expect a great value, and we sort of mismatched expectations. We thought we had it right. But we're also willing to say, 'we missed.' And so we corrected."

"We thought we had it right."

…

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Amazon Fire Phone review

2014-07-22T21:00:31-04:00

Two days after I first turned on the Amazon Fire Phone, I walked into the foyer of my apartment building and saw a package with my name on it. This was odd: I'm the guy who orders something and then sits patiently by the front door waiting for it, not the guy who gets surprised by packages on a Saturday.

This is how life changes when you begin carrying around Amazon's first smartphone. The Fire Phone, which will be available July 24th for $199 and a two-year contract, is the most immediate and accessible device ever made by the company that endeavors to sell us absolutely everything. It's also something even more ambitious: a complete rethi …

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Augmented reality Lego is actually pretty cool

2014-06-19T06:00:04-04:00

Augmented reality toys have become a small but steady part of the gaming market, but augmented reality as a concept has always been hit or miss. If the companion app isn't a tacked-on bell and whistle, the toy itself often isn't much fun to play with. But Lego, which has a long history of blending tech into its traditional building sets, may have struck a decent balance with a new project called Fusion.

Fusion's premise isn't too different to that of similar toys: put an object on top of, or next to, or under a tablet, and a version of it will appear in a corresponding app. It begins with four fairly normal-looking sets, each based on a dif …

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A close-up look at Amazon’s Fire Phone

2014-06-18T19:56:37-04:00

Amazon's smartphone is no longer a rumor. The device, which was announced at an event earlier today in Seattle, is very real and coming to the US beginning July 25th on AT&T starting at $199.99 with a two-year contract. The handset is a first for Amazon, which so far has only dabbled in Kindle e-ink readers and tablets. The Fire Phone is the logical next step in that process, and has a lot in common with its Fire tablets, which also run a heavily modified version of Google's Android.

The phone is unlike any other in that four sensors around the corners of its 4.7-inch HD display track head movement. Combined with other sensors inside the ph …

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Fire Phone against the world: can Amazon take on iOS and Android?

2014-06-18T18:00:57-04:00

With his presentation earlier today, Jeff Bezos wanted consumers to take one thing away from Amazon's Fire Phone: it's different. We've just seen the end result of years of research, most of which seemingly went into the phone's Dynamic Perspective feature, which pulls together multiple front-facing cameras and infrared sensors to implement head-tracking in a way that's different from anything we've seen from a phone. There's also Firefly, the feature that can recognize and identify nearly anything around you, and Mayday, which gives owners a live video connection to Amazon customer support. Bezos even highlighted the Fire Phone's camera, cl …

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Will Amazon’s Fire Phone kill mom and pop stores for good?

2014-06-18T16:34:49-04:00

Amazon has always been a marketplace, first and foremost. Once upon a time, it just sold books - plain, old books - but now it's the "Everything Store."

And looking at today's introduction of the long-rumored Fire Phone, one feature demonstrates just how important that Everything Store is to Jeff Bezos' multibillion-dollar empire: Firefly, an object-recognition technology that lets you snap a picture of virtually anything (or listen in on a song or television show) and buy it from Amazon immediately. The company says it can recognize 100 million different objects. Its goal is no less audacious than to simply turn your entire life, online or …

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The 10 coolest things about Amazon’s new Fire Phone

2014-06-18T15:16:44-04:00

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced his company's first smartphone in Seattle on Wednesday, the Fire Phone, by first turning to a curiously ironic metaphor: a bucket of water. "You can fill a bucket with an eyedropper, if the bucket doesn't leak," Bezos said, striving to convey Amazon's success at getting and keeping customers for its Prime subscription service. Now those Prime customers have a new reason to immerse themselves deeper into Amazon's bucket of devices and services: a smartphone designed just for them.

The Fire Phone is designed for Amazon's "most engaged customers," Bezos said, and it shows. Like Amazon's other devices in the Kind …

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Amazon’s Fire Phone to sell exclusively on AT&T for $199.99 starting July 25th

2014-06-18T14:30:10-04:00

Amazon's new Fire Phone, which was unveiled at an event today in Seattle, will go on sale for $199.99 with a two-year contract on AT&T. That's for the 32GB model; the 64GB model will run $299 on contract. Buyers will also be able to buy it off-contract for $649 and $749 for the 32GB and 64GB models respectively. Amazon's listing both models as shipping July 25th, with preorders starting today. To sweeten the deal, the company's throwing in a "limited time" offer for a free year of Amazon Prime, which normally runs $99 a year.

The phone, which is Amazon's first, features 3D technology the company calls "dynamic perspective." It tracks the us …

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Amazon’s Fire Phone uses multiple front-facing cameras to offer dynamic 3D perspective

2014-06-18T14:21:43-04:00

Just as expected, Amazon's just-announced Fire Phone features a unique interface that is quite a bit different than what you'll see on pretty much any other smartphone on the market. While the basic interface is very much reminiscent of the Kindle Fire tablets, there are a few new tricks that combine the phone's hardware - particularly the multiple front-facing cameras - and software. The phone's dynamic perspective feature updates 60 times per second to make the interface work. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likened it to the move from flat artwork to artwork with geometric perspective which began in the 14th century.

The first demo showed off some …

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Amazon’s Fire Phone recognizes everything around you with ‘Firefly’

2014-06-18T14:11:31-04:00

Amazon's Fire Phone is a showcase for the company's various services, but it's also being positioned as the best possible way to buy products and digital media from Amazon. Jeff Bezos just demoed a new technology called "Firefly" that's capable of recognizing both objects in the real world and content like music and TV shows. Bezos said Firefly can identify up to 100 million items in all. It's triggered by holding the same button that serves as a shortcut to the Fire Phone's camera.

During Bezos' on-stage demonstration, the Fire Phone almost identified household goods like a container of Nutella at near-instantaneous speeds. Firefly lets us …

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