The waiting is over. Yesterday, the infamous Amazon 3D smartphone everybody talked about in the last months made its appearance in the hands of Jeff Bezos.
As suspected, the phone has four cameras and features the ability to deliver greater depth perception in maps and pictures, together with the ability of rendering buildings and art in 3D.
As a phone, stripped of its other features (we will talk about immediately), the Amazon Fire 3D smartphone isn’t something to pay for with your life. It sports a 4.7 inch screen with a solid touch screen, a good key board and other features you can find on almost all premium smartphones on the market.
But the Amazon Fire 3D smartphone also sports other qualities and they are the debatable ones. First and foremost, it is similar with the Kindle Fire tablets, allowing users to access pretty much the same apps, videos, games and other perks common to Amazon Prime members. It also comes with the Firefly, a system that makes the Amazon Fire 3D smartphone different, unique and hard to sell to the masses:
Users can press a button and point the phone at an object such as a can of soup or work of art, or direct it to listen to a song. If the device recognizes it, the user can buy it on Amazon, if it’s sold there. The technology, which works by matching images of items or songs to Amazon’s database of over 100 million items, will be opened to app-developers for use, an approach that rivals Apple and Google have taken with their own mobile software.
After seeing the phone, tech specialists divided in almost two distinct categories: the ones whose minds were blown by the deep perspective and the 3D imagery technology, and the ones considering the phone won’t appeal to anybody, except maybe compulsive shoppers:
Meanwhile, Firefly could encourage more purchases. The feature lets you snap bar codes, phone numbers and more. It can even direct you to facts and data, such as a Wikipedia entry with information about a painting you snapped. It listens to songs, TV shows and movies and can pull up extra info like lyrics, actor bios and other information through its IMDb database.
It is hard to conclude right here and now whether or not the Amazon Fire 3D smartphone will be successful. The point is that Jeff Bezos doesn’t hurry anywhere. He acknowledged the fact that he was way behind smartphone rulers like Apple and Samsung, but all he wanted to do was to bring something different into the world. And from this perspective, he did brilliantly. Not to mention that yesterday, Amazon shares went up 2.7 percent to $334.38.
The Amazon Fire 3D smartphone will be an AT&T exclusive starting July 25. If you want a two – years plan, you will have the new handset available starting at $199. If you are already an Amazon Prime member, your deal is sweetened with some added perks (an extra 12 months of membership).