As expected, Amazon today unveiled a smartphone, dubbed the Fire, which comes with a few bells and whistles that Amazon hopes will set it apart from rival like Apple and Samsung.
"Fire Phone puts everything you love about Amazon in the palm of your hand," CEO Jeff Bezos said during a Seattle launch event.
That includes Mayday, the live customer support option that debuted on the Kindle Fire HDX tablet. A new feature known as Firefly, meanwhile, lets you point your Fire Phone at "over 100 million items" and get an identification in seconds.
The 3D component hinted at in a teaser video is known as Dynamic Perspective, which "recognizes where a user's head is relative to the device [and uses] it to offer customers a more immersive experience, one-handed navigation, and gestures that actually work," Bezos said.
To help boost its new mobile ecosystem, Amazon launched SDKs for Dynamic Perspective and Firefly SDK. "We can't wait to see how developers surprise us," Bezos said.
Spec-wise, the Fire Phone sports a 4.7-inch HD LCD display with 1,280-by-720 resolution at 315 pixels per inch. It runs a 2.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, Adreno 330 GPU, and 2GB of RAM.
In terms of operating system, the Fire Phone taps into Fire OS 3.5.0, which is Amazon's customizable version of Android. It "starts with Android and adds cloud services, a content-forward user interface, built-in media libraries, productivity apps, and platform enhancements to integrate Amazon's digital content and improve performance," Amazon said.
Not surprisingly, users can take advantage of Amazon services. All Fire Phone buyers will get a free year of Amazon Prime, as well as cloud storage for all Amazon content and photos taken with the Fire phone.
The Fire Phone has a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, and records in 1080p at 30 fps from the front- and rear-facing shooters. The device can automatically back up your photos and videos to Amazon Cloud Drive, which will be accessible on the Fire Phone, other Amazon devices, or Cloud Drive apps.
The phone is indeed an AT&T exclusive, and will set you back $199 for the 32GB version with a two-year contract ($299 for 64GB). Buyers can pre-order the device on the Amazon or AT&T websites now, and it will ship on July 25.
Other features expected on the device are: X-ray for deeper info about music, videos, and books; ASAP, which learns what movies and shows you like and gets them ready ahead of time to cut down on buffering; Second Screen, which lets you use your Fire Phone as a remote; and the ability to easily switch between audio books and e-books.
For more, check out PCMag's live blog from the Fire Phone event.