The Amazon Fire Phone promises 3D-trickery with its substandard 2D display. It employs a handful of cameras and sensors to work with its 3D trick. It has a 13-megapixel camera for a rear snapper and a 2.1-megapixel front-camera. There are also dotted additional cameras and infrared LEDs in each of the four corners found around the compact 4.7-inch display. These are the keys to the smartphone’s “Dynamic Perspective” feature.
The Amazon Fire Phone Offers a Different Perspective
The sensor found in the Amazon Fire Phone will track the user’s head movements to animate onscreen items. This will make it appear that they are being viewed from different angles. It is an effect in which Amazon has placed across every corner of their own Fire OS. This can be played around with from the animated lockscreens to the Maps app.
Additionally, these sensors are combined with the built-in accelerometer and gyroscope. This allows the Fire Phone to be able to respond to subtle gesture controls. For instance, if you gently tilt the handset to the right, it will open up the running app’s menu panel. Tilting to the left will then bring up relevant shortcuts and information.
You can also produce a pronounced flick, or swivel, of the mobile device to one side and this will bring up the settings and notifications page. Tilting the smartphone ever so slightly to one side will reveal extra information, or animate 3D buildings, or bring up Yelp.com reviews while in the Amazon Maps app.
All of these seem to be a pretty neat trick, but it is also a major annoyance. Given that you can do a lot of things with slight gestures, it is easy to make a mistake as to what you want to be brought up into the device. In this regard, you might just want to turn the fiddly functionality off.
The phone is also beyond 3D-image trickery as it is made from the massively popular online shopping website. Needless to say, it will want you to buy stuff. When you hold down the camera button along the phone’s edge, the Amazon Firefly app will open up. Why the camera button? The idea is simple – it will use the phone’s camera and built-in mic to recognize physical products, barcodes, and others on TV, movies, or even the radio to provide a link to the product found in their store, IF it is successful. However, it is far from useful as search results will, at most, retrieve blank results.
However, the Amazon Fire Phone does provide decent performance in terms of hardware and software. It also has an excellent screen which makes up for its flaws, albeit only slightly. Also, it should also be noted that this is not a budget phone, and rather far from it. For its price point, you are better off with other smartphones that can give you better features.