Amazon is jumping into the smartphone game with the Fire Phone. It's a natural progression from the Kindle Fire and the Fire TV media streamer, and Amazon is taking aim squarely at other companies' flagship smartphones. Samsung's own flagship, the Galaxy S5, stands at the top of the smartphone heap for most carriers. Let's see how they compare.
Features
Both are Android phones, but Samsung adds its own tricks and unique hardware aspects to a fairly standard version of Android 4.4.2 KitKat, while the Fire Phone uses Amazon's highly modified version of Android, Fire OS. At a glance, Fire OS 3.5's big, friendly tiles and icons look closer to iOS than Android, which is appropriate considering how much the Fire Phone resembles the iPhone 5s.
The Galaxy S5 features an Ultra Power Saving Mode that disables many features and switches to a monochrome display to dramatically increase battery life and keep the phone running when its battery is nearly drained. It features Samsung's S Health fitness tracking software, functioning as a pedometer and a heart rate monitor, and it can work with Samsung's Gear Fit and Gear 2 fitness band and smartwatch. It also boasts a fingerprint reader like the iPhone 5s. Finally, it's water- and dirt-resistant with IP67 certification, making it a remarkably resilient smartphone.
The Fire Phone, on the other hand, uses Fire OS and a few hardware tweaks of its own to get its own set of unique features. It sports a button on the side for Firefly, which can recognize movies and TV shows, songs, phone numbers, websites, and email addresses just by looking at or hearing them. It also has Dynamic Perspective, a unique multi-camera-based gesture and motion-recognition system that allows unique menu navigation. Like the Kindle Fire HDX, the Fire Phone has a Mayday button that can automatically contact technical support with a video chat. It even comes with a year of Amazon Prime, which is very handy thanks to the generous media libraries membership comes with.
Hardware
The Fire Phone features a 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 CPU with an Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB of RAM, comparable to the Galaxy S5's 2.5Ghz quad-core CPU. Its 2,400mAh battery is slightly smaller than the Galaxy S5's 2,800mAh battery, though Amazon claims it can provide up to 22 hours of talk time, 65 hours of audio playback, or 11 hours of video playback. We'll see how the phones stack up in pure performance with our full review and suite of tests.
On the video side, the Fire Phone seems slightly anemic against the Galaxy S5, with a 4.7-inch, 720p screen compared to the Galaxy S5's 5.1-inch, 1080p Super AMOLED display. The Fire Phone can only record 1080p video at 30fps with its 13-megapixel camera, while the Galaxy S5 can record 4K video or 1080p at 60fps with its 16MP camera. The Fire Phone seems slightly more ambitious with sound, with Dolby Digital Plus audio processing and dual stereo speakers.
We'll get a full sense of how Amazon's first smartphone fares when we test it in the lab, but so far it seems a bit less technically impressive than the Galaxy S5. With nearly identical prices, Amazon will have to offer some very appealing features on Fire OS to stand against Samsung's big phone.
Be sure to check out our Amazon Fire Phone hands on and the video below.