Gadgetory

amazon fires up a smartphone with 3d effects I'm Bridget Carey and this is your cnet update amazon has a smartphone that can show you images with 3d effects store unlimited photos online and it has smart scanning to help you buy things faster and it's all for two hundred dollars with a contract amazon is hoping techy tricks and loyal customers are the magic formula to get people to leave their current smartphones for a fire phone the fire phone comes out on july 25th and right now ATT is the only carrier in the u.s. selling it here's a quick breakdown of the phone's features that 3d effect is something amazon calls dynamic perspective where the image changes as you move your phone sensors on four corners track where your head is and it moves in relation to you that 3d effect can be found in maps and also when you're browsing the web and scrolling through text tilting the phone will auto scroll a page or you can even scroll through menus now if you put your finger on the screen it'll stop the scroll effect there's also something called firefly which can recognize a hundred million different items if you point the camera at a package of soap well you can get a link to buy that soap on amazon it can also recognize music to give you a link to buy a song Firefly also identifies art books barcodes and the audio from TV shows free unlimited photo backups are a major perk but the phone itself has some quality parts it has a 4.7 inch screen and Gorilla Glass is on both sides so it doesn't scratch there's a quad-core processor dual stereo speakers and the back sports a 13 megapixel camera the two-hundred-dollar model gets you 32 gigs but there's also a $300 model with double the storage and that's with a contract so while amazon created a new type of phone effect facebook has been busy launching a new type of app it's called slingshot and it's for sending short-lived photos and videos with friends but there's a catch to these messages can't see a photo or video right away it's pixelated you can only unlock it when you sling a photo back to that friend so you're not really having a conversation it's just friends slinging photos and videos back and forth to unlock messages and the cycle of curiosity continues until someone just stops caring so what's the point of all this Facebook is hoping that it catches on with the same crowd that uses snapchat that's another app with disappearing messages Facebook try to copy snapchat once before with an app called poke but that flopped that's your tech news update but you can dive into more details on the fire phone at cnet com from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey