Gadgetory

of course Amazon was making a smartphone our smartphones are our most personal devices our most used devices and Amazon wins when it's right there in front of you so of course Amazon was making a smart phone and this is it the fire phone the first time you look at it or touch it there's really nothing remarkable about the fire phone it's a black rectangle a slab of glass and beveled plastic it's heavy but not really big but not really it's just a phone it has a 4.7 inch 720p display that's not anything special but certainly gets the job done it has three speakers so you'll always get stereo sound it has a raised home button which I weirdly like a lot and an edge to Amazon logo on the back it has excellent performance thanks to a Snapdragon 800 processor and about a day and a half of battery life it's all good enough without ever standing out it's just fine the camera at least is fairly straightforward and pretty good it's 13 megapixels and take solid sharp images in just about any situation it's better in low-light than almost any Android camera I've tested actually there's a nice panorama mode plus one for taking photos you can look at with the dynamic perspective features turned on the only problem is the cameras slow slow to focus slow to shoot just slow the only hint you get from looking at the fire phone that it might be something a little bit different is the 5 count'em 5 camera lens is pointing out of the front bezel they make for an ugly front of a smartphone like exposed screws or visible seams but they enable one of the most important features of the fire phone that features called dynamic perspective it uses 4 cameras in the four corners of the fire phones face to recognize your head its position and its motion and then it lets you see lots of different parts of the phone's OS in 3d sort of when you look at the home screen and move your head around you'll be looking around the icons you can also move the phone which responds to tilts and gestures to always be showing you more information to open the quick settings menu and the notification window you flick your wrist back and forth with the phone in it you tilt it to show hidden menus or pop up more information in a map amazon's whole idea is to take away most of the information on any given screen and only show you what you want to see at that moment games are awesome with dynamic perspective more immersive than just flat-out more fun but with everything else it's just a gimmick and sometimes it's actually unhelpful it means that the fire phone doesn't always show the time or battery levels you have to tilt the phone slightly to make them appear I don't want to do that I want all of that as accessible as possible all this tech is open to developers and they may well find cool ways to use it but really all I wanted to do was turn it off and just use the phone the other big new feature of the fire phone is Firefly it's basically an ultra powerful object recognition tool able to scan email addresses and phone numbers and websites and deodorants and teabags and books and movies and songs and speakers and almost anything else you put in front of the fire phone's camera at a very basic level Firefly is a shopping tool like the ones available for lots of other devices you're running out of soap so you scan the bottle and four seconds later you've bought more soap from Amazon but you can also listen for a song and in one tap start an I heart radio station with whatever you are hearing it's up to developers to make this interesting because all Firefly does is figure out what's being shown eventually it'll do more than just add soap to my Amazon card the problem is it doesn't work all that well it got books right most of the time always figured out what song I was listening to but it often couldn't figure out the object at all or got kind of close but not really Firefly is kind of its own thing a single app with a single purpose but dynamic perspective invades everything about how the fire phone works its software fire OS is all about three panel interfaces in the middle your content on the Left menus on the right is what Amazon calls des lighters little additive tricks that add something fun or useful to the app you're in that concept is fine even though it's frustrating how few third-party apps currently play along it's the navigation that's the problem there's no indication that those menus exists off to the sides or when they exist or what's in them you just have to open an app flick the phone back and forth a million times and see where everything is the fire phones multitasking isn't exactly obvious either I spend a lot of time just hitting the home button going back and starting everything over but even the home screen is confusing it shows every app book or item you've opened in reverse chronological order as you scroll through them below each one is related information your agenda underneath calendar recent text underneath messages underneath most of them though is just more stuff to buy you have to do list app here are five more some things scroll left-to-right some up and down and there's an app drawer hidden underneath the row of icons at the bottom there's a lot going on here and once you understand the paradigm it's even sort of clever but it's a million miles from obvious or intuitive the only thing consistently straightforward about the fire phone is how easy it is to get things from Amazon buying renting streaming anything from Amazon is easy but that's not what a smartphone is for a smartphone is for a lot of things shopping definitely among them but it's also for getting work done for relaxing for communicating and since Amazon doesn't have the Play Store it's missing a huge number of Android apps including all of googles and everything from the email client to the calendar app to Maps suffers as a result Amazon is only going to win if it gets developers on board with its most unique features and when it can't even compete on number of apps it's hard to see them really working to develop for one phone on one carrier from Amazon so the fire phone cost $199 with a two-year contract and it's available from AT&T it's full of big ideas a couple of them huge and full of potential that will probably never be realized in a few months or years things like dynamic perspective and Firefly could go from cool gimmicks to actually important features Mayday the super simple OneTouch support system is really awesome as well and you'll need it in order to figure out how to use the fire phone but in an effort to make something different and new and innovative Amazon kind of forgot to make a good smart phone a good smart phone should be fast and efficient entirely without complications the fire phone tries to be fun and delightful but too often it's just complicated you