Gadgetory

this is the Amazon fire phone its Amazon's first foray into smartphones and with it they take on 3d and an interesting feature that lets you scan the world around you I'm Jessica Dahl Court for CNN and I'm going to take you on a very quick tour but first the specs the phone has a 4.7 inch 720p HD resolution it's a little bit less than some of the phones that we're seeing today but then again the phone is smaller too Amazon said it was really important for them to create a phone that you could hold and operate in one hand if you don't have bigger pots so far I find that this is true and some of the gestures and movements that Amazon has also built into this phone to help along with that but we'll get to those later the phone is black and it has a very slightly rubberized rim that runs all the way around it I found that this was good for gripping there's Gorilla Glass 3 on the front and the back so it creates a nice a slick surface that is actually warm to the touch because it's been held for quite a while it does pick up smudges but it also increases the premium look and feel a little bit but the phone wouldn't jump off the shelf for its build quality but when you look closely you see that there is a little bit of an attention to detail so I don't look at it and think luxury you'll notice that there are five cameras on the very front of the phone and one home button now the cameras are here for motion detection actually tracks the distance between your head and the device and also figures out where you're looking so that creates a 3d effect only one of these cameras is actually going to be used to take selfies and that is the one slightly off-center just to the right of the speaker grille on the top now the home button has three functions first of all it takes you to the home screen slash carousel and that you can use to navigate around some top level apps these are purely optional and customizable you can unpin them if you want to remove the home button also opens up the app grid where you can look at the apps that you have on the device and also those that are stored in the cloud and these kind of move to when you tilt the phone and lastly if you press and hold you will get a voice assistant this is based on the same technology as the one found on Amazon fire TV it is not run by Google there is a Google element however and that is that the OS is based on Android it's completely forked so you can't get into Google Play you have to use Amazon's apps there are 240 thousand of those as of today it is based on an Android jelly bean but it does pull in some of the memory compression found in KitKat and this is the Amazon fire OS version 3.5 on the vacuum have a 13 megapixel camera with optical image stabilization there's an LED flash as well on the side next to the volume controls you have a dual function button press it once to launch the camera you can press it again to take a picture if you press and hold the button that is the feature that will scan the world around you it will identify music a URL and open a page there's an optical character recognition so you can scan a poster with a phone number or business card and be able to capture the business part it will also scan barcodes or if you just hold up a common object it will identify that as well under the hood you've got a 2.2 gigahertz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor so that's pretty fast 2 gigabytes of RAM and here as well battery life is 2400 milliamp hours and there is a promised video playback time of 11 hours now let's take a closer look as a 3d feature Amazon is calling this dynamic perspective and it shows up in a couple different ways so first of all a lockscreen image is deep and rich and if you move it around you can kind of look into the background a little bit so it looks like you're there second of all with mapping when you zoom in on a location if you tilt the phone you can sort of see the street name around it and identify some of the features of landmark in our case the Space Needle since we're in Seattle if you're on the web browser you can also tilt the phone up and down in order to scroll some other motions include flicking your wrist to the right or to the left to pull out additional menus and turning it even further to see a sub context menu now all of these are custom sizeable and controllable in the settings of course the phone does also tie into all of Amazon's own software and services and you will get Amazon Prime for a year I'm Jessica velcro for CNN this has been your first look at the Amazon fire phone for even more information and hands-on impressions go to CNS calm