Amazon Unveils Long-Awaited 'Fire Phone'

(RTTNews) - Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) on Wednesday unveiled its long-expected smartphone Fire Phone, as the online retailing giant forays into the smartphone industry dominated by Apple and Samsung.

The Fire Phone features a 4.7-inch IPS HD display protected by Gorilla Glass 3 technology, and has a rubberized body with aluminum buttons. The phone is powered by a quad-core 2.2 GHz Snapdragon processor with Adreno 330 graphics and 2GB of RAM. It sports a 13 megapixel rear camera with optical image stabilization and HDR capabilities, and lets users store unlimited photos on Amazon Cloud Drive. Fire also includes a 2.1MP front-facing camera, with both cameras capable of recording 1080p HD videos.

As speculated, Fire Phone features 3-D viewing experience technology, called dynamic perspective, and also comes with Firefly, an image-recognition technology. The phone is priced at $199.99 for 32 GB model, or $299 for 64GB. and is available only through AT&T from July 25.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said, "Fire Phone puts everything you love about Amazon in the palm of your hand—instant access to Amazon's vast content ecosystem and exclusive features like the Mayday button, ASAP, Second Screen, X-Ray, free unlimited photo storage, and more."

With the Firefly app, the Fire Phone will be able to scan and identify phone numbers, email addresses, QR and bar codes, everyday products and recognize songs, movies and TV shows, helping users to check prices, make calls or download or review music or movies. The phone has a dedicated Firefly button.

The Fire Phone does not have a 3D display, but a new sensor system called "dynamic perspective', enables the display look like 3D when the phone is tilted or turned. The new sensor system uses four cameras with infrared LEDs built into the front face of Fire and a dedicated processor to achieve the 3D like images.

However, it would be very tough for Amazon to woo customers away from the giants Apple and Samsung, as most of the smartphones users have settled down on Apple's iPhone or Samsung's Galaxy series phones having personalized it by downloading apps, music and photos.

According to research analyst ComScore, Apple dominated the US smartphone market for the three months ended April with a market share of 41.4 percent, while Samsung followed with 27.7 percent share. LG, Motorola and HTC rounded off the top five, respectively. Samsung and Apple control almost half of the global smartphone market.

AMZN is currently trading at $334.92, up $9.30 or 2.86%, on the Nasdaq.