New Amazon Fire Phone: experts divided on shopping giant's new smartphone

 
First foray: the new Amazon Fire Phone, displaying a dynamic perspective effect lock screen image (Picture: AP/Ted S. Warren)
Martyn Landi19 June 2014

Amazon has announced its first venture into the smartphone market with the Fire Phone, and despite all the talk of a fully-fledged 3D display, the announcement by the company's CEO Jeff Bezos was much more restrained.

Build quality and price rival that of Apple and Samsung, but industry experts were divided on the Fire Phone, and how it measures up to the competition.

Ernest Doku, mobiles expert at uSwitch.com said: "Amazon already has two very effective power-ups in its armoury: brand power and reams of content that smartphone users can soup up their mobiles with. Add those to a quality handset and the mobile market may well have a Trojan Horse on its hands.

"However, focusing on the Fire Phone's impressive faux-3D display, luxurious build and 13MP camera in isolation is completely missing the point.

"Amazon's killer blow lies in its deep connection to the Prime subscription service. The Fire Phone is rather a gateway into its millions of books, movies and music on-demand, making the device key to a very appealing package.

"The Fire Phone distills the best of the Amazon user experience in Firefly, where a single button on the device turns your world into a shop window. You like it, you snap it, and you can buy it - but, naturally, only from Amazon."

Duncan Bell, operations editor at UK-based gadget magazine T3 said: "The Amazon phone's solid hardware and verging-on-pointless software features are irrelevant here. Amazon sees this as a platform to flog its content, just as it did with ebooks on Kindles.

"Problem is, all its video and audio content is or will be available on every other device known to humanity, leaving no compelling reason to buy its own phone."

Ramzi Yakob, industry expert and strategist at digital agency TH-NK said: "Alarm bells started ringing when I realised that Jeff Bezos had spent more than twice the amount of time explaining how Dynamic Perspective was developed than actually showing us what it can do to improve the user experience. Although it can produce a lovely aesthetic that may be delightful in a small number of contexts, it clearly isn't a game changer.

"Firefly is interesting, but not because it's new; 'Google Goggles' and I'm sure many other apps out there do very similar types of things, although perhaps not quite as well. But it's the first of its kind that I've seen that is open to developers to build upon and improve which gives it scope to be really useful for people. Question is; will the Fire sell enough to incentivise brands and businesses to take it seriously enough to invest in?

"Looking past the much-hyped '3D' effect, actually there's a decent piece of kit with some nice features. A quality camera and screen, a reasonable price, free and unlimited photo storage, and a year of Amazon Prime thrown in to boot are enough to shift units on their own."

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