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Amazon Announces 'Fire Phone' With 3D 'Dynamic Perspective' Interface, 'Firefly' Object Recognition Engine

jsw said:
It has to be the former, since the screen itself has no 3D capability. It's just changing the perspective based on your viewing angle and distance.
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Ahh, then in that case color me greatly unimpressed. I can't see this being useful for much. It may be good for shopping Amazon's site as I'm sure they will tool it up for 3d, but it's not like I spend that much time shopping where I need it to resemble a game. It might be cool for games, that's about it. Mapping I don't see why I would need to be turning the phone and my head to see different 3d perspectives especially while I'm driving.
 
Jessica Lares said:
Me either.

But the majority of people who visit tech blogs and message boards are not the targets for this. Your parents and grandparents are.
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The Mayday function sounds like it'd be perfect for the latter. No more playing IT support for your own folks.
 
Seems like everyone agrees. It is a cool looking phone, but priced poorly if they truly want to sell this device. Even worse, they signed an exclusive deal with att. I wonder how long that is for?
 
Apple seems to have gone into hibernation when it comes to services and content tailored to consumers. Their products are really nice but slowly but surely they are losing me as a customer one device at a time. Amazon is making a lot of right moves. Have been a virtually exclusive Apple customer since the Apple//. It's really unfortunate.
 
NightFox said:
Are you really that short-sighted that you can't see the relevance of this to the iPhone? You don't think Android has in any way influenced the development of iOS or even Samsung have influenced the development of the iPhone?
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Of course I can. But that still doesn't change my mind. I don't care about Amazon's new smartphone. This won't even worry Apple one tiny bit.

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nfl46 said:
Very nice, Amazon! Great job!
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Sarcasm or not?
 
Stella said:
Its got everything to do with that - if Dynamic Perspective was on the iPhone 6 you'd be seeing more positive reaction.

Yes, it will drain battery life….
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I was referring to me personally not thinking that. And of course, you're on a pro-apple site. People will tend to like what they do more than one of their competitors, but Macrumors does have a large number of users that look at things without bias.
 
Stella said:
Its got everything to do with that - if Dynamic Perspective was on the iPhone 6 you'd be seeing more positive reaction.

Yes, it will drain battery life….
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It's a nice feature whatever phone it's on... BUT is it just a gimmick other than on maps.

It uses 4 cameras on the front! Car-a-zy!

It's very very heavy as Smart phones go. 160grams.
 
horsebattery said:
The Mayday function sounds like it'd be perfect for the latter. No more playing IT support for your own folks.
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Yes but you include this feature on a $199 phone with huge icons like the Kindle Fire and give it to your parents.

You don't include the coolest features that the tech world never asked for.

Mayday Yes
Firefly Yes
Free cloud picture storage Yes

Everything else just confuses people and raises the price.

Maybe they need to make the Fire Phone G

G for grandparents
 
Well, looks interesting.

Sounds like a nice step and to see what Apple does...which means Apple probably WONT start at 32gb...and WONT do unlimited Cloud Storage for Photos.

Apple, if it does offer those 2 above will only do that in next years phone release.


I will say, Amazon is offering some interesting things this year. I guess the Prime Price Raise was to offer all this stuff for "free" to the new owners of Amazon Devices.
 
Also included with the phone is a new flagship feature called Firefly, a virtual recognition program able to recognize QR codes, barcodes, objects, and more, which facilitates the discovery and purchase of various items.
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gee, a flagship feature for buying more crap. talk about a feature i never knew i needed....
 
Stella said:
The negative comments are due to the Dynamic Perspective didn't come from Apple. If it did, it would be magical and revolutionary.
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"An image that changed with your perspective for a 3D illusion" was brought to us in the form of the iOS7 home screen. Most people don't like it, and some actually get sick from it. Apple later provided an update that allowed people to disable it.

So (1), something similar did come from Apple, and (2) people don't care about it at all, much less think it is magical and revolutionary.
 
Good one.

"As for the phone's UI, it includes an app grid that lets users pin content like books, apps, magazines, and more..."

That would be nice. I'd like to be able to just drop the book I'm currently reading on the "desktop" on my iPad, instead of having to go back through and look for it in iBooks (say if I had used iBooks to look up something else in another book). The Collections scheme is sorta brain dead. Why isn't there an automatic "All" collection? Why isn't there an automatic "Recents" collection? And why doesn't the list of collections use the whole length of the iPad screen, instead of making you scroll? It used to.

Feedback submitted.
 
Rogifan said:
When Apple announces the first iPad mini and put the price up on the screen the stock took a nose dive. Same thing with the iPhone 5c. Amazon stock is up 3% today even though the phone isn't that cheap, no revolutionary/unique data pricing and locked to AT&T. I don't get it. Plus it seems there are very few features that are hardware specific. Even aspects of the Firefly feature already exist on the Amazon iOS app. What is the point of Amazon doing its own hardware when it's goal of getting more people to buy stuff from amazon.com can be accomplished via software?
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Amazon's stock is not based on profit because Amazon never has had much if a profit. Apple however has to maintain a huge revenue and profit. Anything that threatens that sends the stock down.
In other words, Amazon can't lose. Even if the phone fails the stock won't be affected.
 
ricktat said:
Yes but you include this feature on a $199 phone with huge icons like the Kindle Fire and give it to your parents.

You don't include the coolest features that the tech world never asked for.

Mayday Yes
Firefly Yes
Free cloud picture storage Yes

Everything else just confuses people and raises the price.

Maybe they need to make the Fire Phone G

G for grandparents
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Yep, they did that with their Kindle Fire lines I believe - not all of them comes with Mayday. It's going to be interesting to see how well this sells.
 
I'm impressed. For their first smartphone they did a pretty decent job. Unlikely on par with the latest Android devices or iPhones, but still a pretty neat execution with some very handy tweaks that I would like to see on the iPhone too (starting with a more flexible home screen). For content consumers and Amazon shopaholics probably not a bad deal, which is Amazon's target group after all. It's only unfortunate that they didn't come up with a better pricing and distribution model, although the included one-year membership of Amazon Prime should scrape off a part of the price.
 
Stella said:
The negative comments are due to the Dynamic Perspective didn't come from Apple. If it did, it would be magical and revolutionary.
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Yeah because people here are constantly raving about parallax vs. asking how to turn it off. :rolleyes:
 
tech-specs wise, looks decent. My concern would be paying a premium for 4 (3) additional cameras. Dynamic Perspective might be a cool thing, but not worth that cost. I'm not sure why Amazon would think it's worth it. On the other hand, I don't care. I've been satisfied with my Apple products and how they work together so I'm not even considering a different brand.
 
RF9 said:
Amazon's stock is not based on profit because Amazon never has had much if a profit. Apple however has to maintain a huge revenue and profit. Anything that threatens that sends the stock down.
In other words, Amazon can't lose. Even if the phone fails the stock won't be affected.
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That's why Amazon stock is a joke. I've never known another company in history that can get away with promising profits in the future for 18 years.
 
Jessica Lares said:
Me either.

But the majority of people who visit tech blogs and message boards are not the targets for this. Your parents and grandparents are.

The only real problem I have is all those front cameras. Android doesn't sandbox stuff like iOS does, and those front cameras are pretty scary since they work in the dark and are invisible.
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Agreed. I think adding Google Play (I haven't seen any mention of it) would slightly help this phone out.
 
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