Global e-commerce giant Amazon on Wednesday announced its smartphone Fire – priced at $649 — to fuel shopping experience to Americans initially.
American telecom carrier AT&T will sell Fire exclusively on its network.
AT&T will be offering the Fire Phone with 32 gigabytes of memory for a price of $199.99 with a two-year wireless contract, while a 64-gigabyte version will cost you $299.99. Amazon website listed the smartphone for a price of $649 without a contract.
Amazon does not talk about its expansion plans and availability of the phone in other international markets. Apple and Samsung, main smartphone vendors, are yet to officially respond on the Amazon move.
What’s Fire
Amazon Fire is a smartphone that comes with Dynamic Perspective and Firefly, two new technologies, to enable the e-commerce vendor to boost its sales.
Bloomberg reported that smartphone gives Amazon a way to feature its online store and digital services for games, mobile applications, movies and music on the computing device people take with them wherever they go.
Instead of having its app among the hundreds of thousands available through Apple’s App Store or Google Play store, Amazon’s services are the centerpiece of the new device. Earlier today, BlackBerry also said its smartphone customers will gain access to Amazon’s app store, which has many programs that BlackBerry users can’t currently download.
While Amazon has used this strategy with its Kindle Fire tablet and Fire TV set-top box, the smartphone market is a much larger opportunity. IDC says the number of smartphone users worldwide is quickly approaching 2 billion.
Fire technology
Dynamic Perspective, invented by Amazon, uses a new sensor system to respond to the way you hold, view, and move Fire, enabling experiences not possible on other smartphones.
Firefly recognizes things in the real world — web and email addresses, phone numbers, QR and bar codes, movies, music, and millions of products, and you can take action in seconds with the press of a button.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO, said: “The Firefly button lets you identify printed web and email addresses, phone numbers, QR and bar codes, artwork, and over 100 million items, including songs, movies, TV shows, and products—and take action in seconds.”