Amazon breaks into the smartphone market with the Fire phone

Amazon made its move into the smartphone market today by announcing the Fire, which runs on Amazon's Android-based Fire OS and ties directly into the popular Amazon App Store. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the phone during a press event in Seattle. The device, which will be available July 25th exclusively from AT&T, has a 4.7-inch LCD screen, four front-facing cameras and a 13-megapixel camera on its back. Inside, it's running on a 2.2 Ghz CPU, 2 GB of RAM and an Adreno 330 mobile GPU. Assuming you buy into a two-year contract, the 32 GB model will run you $199, while the 64 GB Fire clocks in at $299. Of course, what makes the Fire phone so interesting is the fact that, like the Kindle Fire tablet, it's built to support Amazon's existing services -- including the remarkably game-friendly Amazon App Store. Owners will also be able to ask for help with their phone via Amazon's extant Mayday online tech support service, for example, and store an unlimited number of photos for free on Amazon's servers. Naturally, the Fire will also ship with support for Amazon's various content delivery services -- Prime Instant Streaming, Amazon Kindle, and Amazon Music -- and, at least for a limited time, a free year of Amazon Prime membership. The company is also building a product recognition service called Firefly into the Fire phone that's designed to identify both physical and digital products -- shoes, TV shows, songs and the like -- based on a photograph or a snippet of music, presumably in an effort to drive more money to Amazon's core retail business. The phone even has a dedicated Firefly, alongside the four aforementioned low-power cameras. Those four front-facing cameras are used to track the phone's position in relation to your face, which allows it to do cosmetic tricks like causing images to shift perspective or automatically scrolling up and down as you tilt the phone. Amazon calls it the "Dynamic Perspective" system, and it's making both the Dynamic Perspective SDK and the Firefly SDK available to developers. From a developer perspective, the launch of the Fire is worth noting because it's likely to shepherd a remarkable number of new users to the Amazon Appstore -- and those people will be looking to load up their new phones with Fire-friendly games and apps.

Watching Jeff Bezos play Angry Tofu and rescue Fortune Kitty made my day. #AmazonEvent pic.twitter.com/5nU0jpIFU2

— BraveNewBookshelves (@BraveNewBks) June 18, 2014

The front-facing cameras also offer some intriguing possibilities for developing mobile games that play with 3D perspective in interesting ways -- during the presentation Bezos demonstrated Angry Tofu, a version of HotGen's iOS game To-Fu: The Trials of Chi that had been redesigned to permit players to adjust their in-game perspective by tilting the phone or moving their head in front of it.