With all the recent announcements from major companies, news sites would compete with each other to leak the technical specifications of the device. Sometimes it would seem that nothing had been leaked, they simply copied the article from the previous device and added a few features.
Last night (Wednesday), the retail and digital book giant Amazon brought the first real innovation of the year.
After two years of guesswork and speculation, at a press conference held by the company in Seattle, CEO Jeff Bezos introduced the company's first smartphone, the Fire Phone.
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The device comes equipped with technology that has never been seen on the market before. Although it is not entirely clear how it will work with the battery, it is quite impressive technology that redefines the concept of 3D, or as Amazon calls it, "Dynamic Perspective.".
Four cameras are located in the four corners of the device, each accompanied by an infrared beam, which scan the user's face at all times, and the display on the screen is determined based on the position of the face, so that the user "sees" what is displayed on the screen in 3D. According to Bezos, no matter how you hold the device, two cameras will remain visible to monitor your face.
Amazon integrates a remote support service called "Mayday" into the device, a service that allows the service representative to see your device's screen and solve the most difficult customer service problem, what is the problem with your device.
A new service announced with the smartphone is "Firefly," an app that allows the camera to identify products from Amazon and save them for purchase; the app also functions as "Shazam" - identifying music and suggesting it for purchase; Amazon claims that Firefly is capable of identifying over 100 million products, as well as texts and numbers.
The device comes with a 4.7-inch HD-720 display, protected by Gorilla Glass 3 on the front and back; the processor is a Qualcomm quad-core processor clocked at 2.2 GHz per core, 2 GB of RAM, and 32 or 64 GB of internal storage, with no word on expansion. Amazon also offers unlimited storage in their cloud service for photos.
The rear camera comes with a 13-megapixel sensor and optical image stabilization, a stabilizer that, according to the company's demonstration, offers cleaner night images than the iPhone.
The device supports the fourth generation network (LTE), weighs 160 grams and is 8.9 mm thick. The battery has a capacity of 2,400 mAh, which provides - according to Bezos - 11 hours of intensive work and should last two days without charging with daily use. The device runs the Fire OS 3.5 operating system, a special version of Android from Amazon that does not include Google services.
Amazon has about half a million digital books in its online store for the Kindle - the digital book reader that became a tablet, the one that "gave birth" to the smartphone we see today. Amazon's digital book library is the largest in the world.
In a strange and unclear move, Amazon chose to market the device only in the US, and exclusively through the cellular provider AT&T. The device costs $200 (on contract) and is available for pre-order starting today.
The first smartphones are expected to reach buyers on July 25 - a little over a month from now. The company did not provide information regarding future marketing plans in global markets, but the technology it uses is supported in most countries around the world.
