Amazon on Wednesday announced the Fire Phone, and it's clear the company is going all-in on the smartphone game. Rather than introducing a device almost fully subsidized through the carrier and Amazon Prime, the Fire Phone will cost $199.99 for a 32GB model from AT&T. That's the same price as many other high-end smartphones, including Apple's iPhone 5s. Considering that, is the Fire Phone a better device than the iPhone 5s? Let's compare the specs to help you decide.
For one thing, it's clear the Fire Phone is no slouch in the hardware department. It has a 4.7-inch, 720p IPS LCD. That's not nearly as dense as the 1080p display on many of the high-end Android phones on the market, but at 312 pixels per inch, it should be relatively comparable with the 4-inch, 1,136-by-640-pixel display on the iPhone 5s, which has 326 pixels per inch. The Fire Phone also has 590 nits of brightness, which means it can get super bright, and a circular polarizer so it will work with sunglasses. That's pretty cool, but if sunglasses aren't a must-have factor to you, though, then this category seems like a toss-up.
The Fire Phone is powered by a 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor with an Adreno 330 GPU, which isn't the fastest chip available (that'd be Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801), but it should still be fast enough to keep pace with the iPhone 5s. There's no good way to compare these processors directly, since the iPhone uses Apple's A7 processor, but suffice to say that both are plenty powerful.
Simply by looking at the specs on paper, the Fire Phone's 13-megapixel rear camera and 2-megapixel front-facing camera should be better than the iPhone's 8-megapixel and 1.2-megapixel cameras. But we've seen plenty of phones with more megapixels fail to measure up to the iPhone 5s, which still delivers some of the best images we've seen from a camera phone. So ultimately this is a category that can't be judged until we can put the Fire Phone to the test.
On the design front, the Fire Phone shares an undeniably familiar aesthetic with the iPhone. In particular, the Gorilla Glass on the front and back of the phone calls to mind the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s. The Fire Phone has a larger screen, though, so ultimately you should pick the phone with the most comfortable size for your hand. As a longtime iPhone user, I've been ready for something with a larger screen, and I think the 4.7-inch display on the Fire Phone could really be a sweet spot.
There's also software to consider, and once again we'll need to get the Fire Phone in for extended testing to see how Amazon's Fire OS fares on the small screen. The Fire Phone runs a modified version of the Fire OS you'll find on Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets, and Amazon promises access to "all the apps you want from the Amazon Appstore."
But the Amazon Appstore is not the same as Google Play, which means the Fire Phone could be missing out on many of the apps you'll be able to find on standard Android devices. The Apple App Store, meanwhile, is still arguably the most robust in the business, with well over one million apps available. But if you love to use Amazon, the Fire Phone makes it super easy to tap into all of its services. Built-in features like Firefly let you identify just about anything—like a book, television show, or even a bag of chips—and order it directly from Amazon.
The Fire Phone is available for pre-order now and will start shipping on July 25. So if you're looking to buy a new phone, should you pull the trigger? If you're heavily invested in the Amazon ecosystem and want a phone that makes it even easier to get Amazon content, then go for it. Otherwise, you might want to wait until we get a chance to put the phone through its paces for a full review.
For more, check out The Amazon Fire Phone Event's Biggest Surprise, as well as our Hands On With the Amazon Fire Phone, and our analysts' first take in the video below.