Gadgetory

the first smartphone designed by Amazon is finally here we've shown you its most fun features and run through its camera capabilities over at pocketnow.com and now after six days of testing it's time to tell you whether you should be playing with fire and before we plop down any more predictable puns let's get started i'm michael fisher with pocket now and this is the Amazon fire phone video review the fire phone is a mid-sized handheld featuring once striking now predictable glass sandwich construction its build consisting of Gorilla Glass and rubberized polyurethane heavily resembles the Nexus 4 while its size and shape 10 more toward the iPhone 5 it comes in any color you want as long as it's black and while it is quite susceptible to fingerprints it feels nice and substantial in the hand it's powered by a very capable set of specs and though its display is only 720p at 4.7 inches we don't mind for all the focus on ultra resolution panels these days the fire phones 315 pixels per inch are still plenty and the four cameras dotting the corners enable a feature that makes resolution much less noticeable that feature is called dynamic perspective and it enables the best handheld 3d effect we've ever seen yes it's a gimmick at heart but Amazon has woven in some practicality here as well tilting the screen reveals details otherwise hidden like the status bar up top they're helpful descriptors on menu items it's odd at first but you get used to it over time along with the gesture driven flick action the fire phone recognizes to pop open side panels in most apps sure you can use your thumb if you're too self-conscious to do this on the train or at the bar but the flick is handy for one-handed use as is the tilt to scroll effect in the browser even putting the bells and whistles aside it's hard not to appreciate a new interface after months and months of the same old thing the homescreen carousel displays recently used apps books movies and so on in an almost never-ending ribbon up top while down below a context menu appears for each of them allowing you to do things like delete emails without even opening the having the carousel on top and the context menus down below looks good but for usability we wish it was inverted it's awkward to be constantly reaching up to the ribbon all the time also not all apps can take advantage of the action area often they just display related titles in the Amazon App Store which is not very helpful speak to the App Store well if you're like us it'll impress you at first with popular titles and there are even some cool games here that take advantage of the fires dynamic perspective but take much deeper than that and you're reminded that this isn't the Google Play Store Gmail Google Maps hangouts nowhere to be found in Amazon's marketplace if you're not too reliant on Google's ecosystem well then the fire phone will probably feel a lot like Windows Phone in the sense that its stock apps are well designed responsive and attractive so it's not all bad but the fact that many mobile sites identify the fire phone as an Android device and prompt you to download the app instead even when such an app doesn't exist is galling and only serves to remind you of the limited catalog you're forced to deal with if you don't want to sideload apps Amazon's media offerings are much more impressive of course the company has found a nice way to showcase this using Firefly a nicely designed app which is the main reason people have taken to calling the fire phone an expensive barcode scanner but it can do more like replace Shazam as a song identifier and we really like how quickly it can identify a movie or TV show - the free year of Amazon Prime you get when you buy a fire phone is also nice but in terms of media at least it doesn't bring quite enough to overcome the app stores lack of many quality titles if there's one glaring problem with the fire phone it's a familiar one for smaller platforms the ecosystem shooting photos with the fire phones 13 megapixel camera is a lot of fun the viewfinder is simple and can be launched with a touch of the side key and it's smart it suggests HDR when applicable which can then be enabled with a tap it also offers a fun lenticular shooting mode so you can create photos that respond to dynamic perspective photo quality itself is okay the fire phone has the same exposure sensitivity issue as some other devices we've seen so where you focus has a big effect on whether a photo is washed out or very dim there's also not much dynamic range saturation is often on the low side and while HDR does help sometimes it also washes out colors even more while introducing more fuzz to the picture low-light performance certainly isn't the worst we've seen but it's also nothing spectacular despite the optical image stabilization on the upside all of the photos you take are backed up on Amazon Cloud storage for free 1080p video recording is fun in that you get a nice smooth image on the viewfinder that said the focus tends to drift easily the colors don't pop quite as much as we'd like once again and the microphone is very easy to cover up accidentally without knowing it the fire phone is well designed from an audio standpoint at least for voice calls there's great warm side tone in the earpiece and in loudspeaker mode one color said they couldn't tell we were on a speakerphone the speakers are mounted at top and bottom which makes for some nice stereo effects in landscape but while they're loud they're also so tinny that we really don't like using them if we don't have to fortunately the fire phone comes with earbuds in the box their acoustic merits are debatable but they do feature magnets to keep them bonded and that great linguini style wire that we liked so much the fire phone is exclusive to AT&T so you'll be happy to know that our testing on big orange went quite well LTE speeds initially weren't as blazing-fast as we've grown accustomed to but they sped up as our six-day review period went on and having coverage everywhere from the burbs to the Boston subways is always nice as we mentioned before gaming is a real pleasure on such powerful Hardware but you're definitely going to want to take a charger with you if you're planning on anything close to heavy use we haven't even been able to get to four hours of screen on time with the fire phone and we've absolutely needed to charge it every night usually before the day is even over while we are using it more heavily than you probably well this is no phone for road warriors in a sense the fire phone is surprisingly predictable it brings equal parts and novel delights and first generation pain points on the plus side its interface really is a breath of fresh air Amazon features like whisper sync x-ray ASAP and others really are useful and even its gimmicks are charming mainly because they actually work the way they're supposed to the stumbling block here is the ecosystem hit combined with a price point that's just too high considering the competition if every other platform out there bores you to tears or if this is your first smartphone or if you really are a die-hard Amazonian in every sense well then the fire phone is a great Buy but that's a pretty small audience for everyone else you'll get a lot more for your money going with one of the major platforms Amazon's first smartphone isn't a bad product by any means but it is twice the price it should be for more on the Amazon fire phone check out these videos and visit pocketnow.com on august 1st for our full written review also be sure to follow us on social media and leave a comment down below letting us know what you think of the fire phone the comments section is right next to the like button please press it if you enjoyed this review until next time this has been michael fisher with PocketNow thanks for watching and we'll see you very soon you