United States
Price : $ 189
United Kingdom
Price : £299
See other product :
* Samsung Galaxy S6 * Amazon Fire Phone
* Sony Xperia Z3 Compact D5803 * Motorola Moto G (2nd Generation)
* Samsung Galaxy A5 * Samsung Galaxy Young 2
* Samsung Galaxy S3 mini * Samsung Galaxy J1
* LG Realm * Nokia Lumia 635
* Nokia Lumia 520 * BLU Advance 4.0 A270A
* HTC Desire 510 (A11) white * HTC one M9
The Fire is Amazon's first smartphone and
launched in September 2014. It has some unique features, including
3D-like visual effects and a visual search which can identify objects
using the phone's camera (we'll explain why later on). It uses Amazon's
customised Android operating system and offers easy access to all things
Amazon.
Amazon Fire Phone review: specs and features
Even at the lower prices, the Fire phone has some tough competition. In terms of hardware, the Fire Phone is very much mid-range. It has a 4.7in IPS display - the same size as the iPhone 6
- with a resolution of 1280x720 pixels, giving it a pixel density of
312ppi. That's good, but not great in the current market. (The iPhone 6
has an unusual resolution of 1334x750 which gives it a slightly higher
"Retina" pixel density of 326ppi.) It pairs a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 CPU with 2GB RAM, so
performance is decent. As we've said, there's a choice of 32GB or 64GB
of stoage but there's no storage expansion slot. An onboard Adreno 330
GPU takes care of graphical duties.
It's a 4G LTE handset, with GPRS, EDGE, 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac dual-band
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, NFC and USB connecivity via a microUSB 2.0 port. It also has stereo speakers and both front and rear-facing cameras.
The latter is a 13Mp camera capturing 4128x3096 pixels and has optical
image stabilisation, autofocus and an LED flash. It can capture 1080p
video at 30fps, and there's a front-facing 2.1Mp camera for selfies and
video calls.
Amazon Fire Phone review: build and design
If it had an aluminium band around the edge, the design would be
reminiscent of the iPhone 4, since the Fire phone has flush glass front
and rear panels. It also has a top-mounted headphone socket and
sleep/wake button.
There are no buttons on the right-hand side but on the left are
volume and a dual-purpose camera/Firefly button (we'll come to that in a
moment). At the bottom is a microUSB port for easy charging and synching, and
there's a physical home button below the screen. Stereo speakers hide
behind grilles on the top and bottom edges, and produce decent audio
with good stereo separation. It's a fairly chunky device, weighing 158g and being - as near as makes no difference - 9mm. The only thing we don't like is that the four courner-mounted sensors
- which look just like the front-facing camera - are very obvious, and
make the phone a little messy looking.
Amazon Fire Phone review: Fire OS
Although the Fire phone runs a similar operating system to Amazon's
Fire tablets, this is basically a new OS in the smartphone world. It's
based on Android of course, but you wouldn't know it: there isn't a
single icon, button or font that's borrowed from KitKat or Lollipop. If you've used an Amazon Fire tablet, you'll be right at home since
navigation is very similar. You get a carousel of recent apps and
content, and you swipe upwards to see all your apps. Swiping down from
the top brings up a revised control centre and notification area. Selecting an item from the carousel displays context-sensitive
options below it. Stop the carousel on the Silk web browser, for
example, and you'll see a short list of recently visited websites.
Rotate it to the camera and recent photos are shown, go to a game or app
and you might see recent achievements or settings or options. You get
the idea. What's not quite as obvious is that you can swipe in from the
right-hand side to display upcoming calendar appointments, a weather
forecast and your 'VIP' contacts. Swipe in from the left and you get a
new version of the menu bar which runs across the top on a Fire tablet,
letting you quickly jump to your music, videos, photos, apps, games,
documents. Also in the list are Shop and Prime, but they're not the only way
Amazon integrates its services. Tap on Books and you'll see a shopping
basket icon at the top right: a quick way to jump to the Kindle
bookstore. As you'd expect, it's the same in Apps, Games and Audiobooks.
Tap on Videos and Amazon's Prime Instant service leaps into life. While Amazon's selection of books and music rivals the best out
there, it's a different story with apps and games. The selection is much
better than it was a year or two ago, but you'll still find both
big-name and more obscure apps missing.
For example, BBC iPlayer, Whatsapp, Real Racing 3, Waze, Just Eat,
Fitbit and even the Nest smart thermostat app are all there ready to
install for free. However, try to match the full set of apps you have on
your iPhone or Android smartphone and you'll quickly find holes. Internet banking apps are scarce, and you won't find any official
Google apps such as Maps, Gmail or YouTube. There's still no 4 on Demand
app, not ITV Player. If you also have a few smartphone-accessed
gadgets, there's a good chance there's not yet an Amazon app available. A
few which proved problematic for us included the Nike Fuelband, Y-cam
HomeMonitor IP cameras, Parrot's Flower Power (a Bluetooth plant
monitor) and the Tado smart thermostat.
Amazon Fire Phone review: Firefly
One feature which you won't find on a Kindle Fire tablet is Firefly.
Firefly is the principal reason for the Fire Phone existing, and has
been described as 'Shazam for the real world'. Using Firefly you can
take pictures of just about anything, and the Fire Phone will extract
the useful information in a semantic style. See a product you like, take
a picture, and buy it. Firefly uses the camera app to identify music, movies, TV episodes,
books, games, DVDs and other products. It can also recognise printed
text such as web addresses, email addresses and phone numbers, and let
you tap to go directly to the website, send an email or call a number
without typing a digit. Firefly tended to work best with book and DVD covers, offering IMDB
reviews as well as links to buy the item in Amazon's shop. It was also
reliable for URLs and phone numbers.
Amazon Fire phone review: cameras
Camera quality is increasingly important as smartphones take over
from traditional digital cameras. The specs are respectable: 13Mp on the
rear, with optical stabilisation, and 2.1Mp at the front. While the front snapper is nothing special - it's fine for the odd
selfie and Skype chats - the rear is pretty good. Images have realistic
colours and are generally sharp and detailed. It's only when you zoom in
and scrutinise quality that you'll find a lot of compression and smudgy
textures. Plus, the quality in low light isn't great.
The camera app is shared with Firefly, which can be confusing. A long
press of the dedicated shutter button starts Firefly, while a short
press - even in sleep mode - wakes up the camera app. HDR is suggested
automatically based on the scene, and there's a panorama mode too. A
strange Lenticular mode allows you to take up to 11 photos from slightly
different angles, resulting in a stilted animation which you can only
view on the phone itself.
Price : $189
See other product :
* Samsung Galaxy S6 * Amazon Fire Phone
* Sony Xperia Z3 Compact D5803 * Motorola Moto G (2nd Generation)
* Samsung Galaxy A5 * Samsung Galaxy Young 2
* Samsung Galaxy S3 mini * Samsung Galaxy J1
* LG Realm * Nokia Lumia 635
* Nokia Lumia 520 * BLU Advance 4.0 A270A
* HTC Desire 510 (A11) white * HTC one M9