Review: Amazon's Fire Phone offers new gimmicks, old platform growing pains

It took other companies a long time to respond to the iPad. Early efforts like the first Samsung Galaxy Tabs, the Motorola Xoom, and Barnes & Noble's Nook Color had their fans, but compared to Apple's tablets, they all had major flaws. Amazon's first Kindle Fire had its problems too, but Amazon's name recognition and the tablet's $199 price made it one of the iPad's first semi-credible competitors. It opened the door for even better tablets at the same price point, and Android's tablet market share is largely built on the cheap tablet foundation that Amazon helped establish.

Amazon's first smartphone is taking the opposite path. It's jumping into the high-end smartphone market surprisingly late in the game. The market started showing signs of saturation, and its competitors are entrenched. At $649 unlocked for a 32GB phone ($199 with a two-year contract), it doesn't have a price advantage. It's also not being subsidized by Amazon's media storefronts or by 'Special Offers'-style advertisements.

Because it's 2014, because the phone costs what it does, and because there are dozens of great phones to be had at (and well below) this price bracket, it's going to be much more difficult for users to overlook flaws or shortcomings when compared to those first Kindle Fire tablets. Amazon's phone brings unique features, like its Dynamic Perspective head tracking cameras and its Firefly scanning software, but can the phone get by on a couple of cool features if it has other problems?

Specs at a glance: Amazon Fire Phone Screen

1280×720 4.7' (315 PPI) IPS touchscreen

OS

FireOS 3.5.1, based on Android 4.2.2

CPU

2.15GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800

Networking

Single-stream 802.11b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 3.0, NFC

Network

UMTS/HSPA+/DC-HSDPA (850, 900, 1700/2100, 1900, 2100 MHz), Quad-band GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz), 9 bands of 4G-LTE (Bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 17, 20)

Ports

Micro-USB, headphones

Camera

13MP rear f/2.0 camera with OIS, 2.1 MP front camera

Size

5.5' x 2.6' x 0.35' (139.2 x 66.5 x 8.9mm)

Starting price

$649 off contract, $199 with 2-year AT&T contract

Other perks

Dynamic Perspective sensors, dedicated shutter button

To answer that question, we took an extensive look at the Fire Phone's hardware, the latest version of the FireOS Android fork and its app and media ecosystems, and the Dynamic Perspective and Firefly features. Like everyone else, we wanted to know if all the stuff on that list adds up to a phone that can go toe-to-toe with iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and the other smartphones that are competing for your money.

Hardware and screen

The Fire Phone's design follows the 'black rectangle' playbook to the letter. It has a black glass front and a black glass back with a rubberized plastic rim, and it's actually more than a little reminiscent of LG and Google's Nexus 4. The phone is entirely black except for a silver Amazon logo in slightly raised lettering on the back, and its unassuming spare design is in line with what we've seen in the Kindle Fire tablets.

Companies like LG and Apple were big on glass-backed phones a couple of years ago, since glass often looks nicer than plastic and doesn't interfere with radio signals like metal does. The problem is that glass isn't as durable as plastic or metal, and a glass back looks a whole lot worse once you scratch or crack it. Most OEMs these days are either using plastic (Samsung, LG) or metal with small plastic or glass cutouts for radio signals (Apple, HTC). Glass smudges easily, too, and we hadn't even used our Fire Phone for a day before it was covered in fingerprints. Be aware of the upsides and downsides of using a glass-backed phone.

The rubberized rim and the sub-5-inch screen both make the Fire Phone feel nice in your hand. It's a nice compromise between the small iPhone 5S and bordering-on-too-large Android flagships like the HTC One M8 or Galaxy S5. The 4.7-inch, 1280×720 screen is the same size and resolution as the one used in the Moto X, and while it's not as nice or as crisp as the 1080p displays in other Android flagships, it's still sharp enough that most people won't have a problem with it.

The nice-looking IPS display in the Fire Phone gets bright enough for outdoor viewing, and it has nice viewing angles-a necessity for a phone that's meant to be tilted around and looked at from every which way. The irritating blue backlight bleeding present on the Kindle Fire HDX is absent here. Blacks don't get as black as they do on an AMOLED panel, but by the same token the IPS technology doesn't oversaturate colors like AMOLED can.

The phone has a 4.7-inch screen, but it's close in size to 5-inch phones like the Nexus 5 (center) and HTC One M8 (right).

The Fire Phone's glass back and rubberized edge reminds us of the Nexus 4 (center). Glass-backed phones like those and the iPhone 4S (right) look nice, but they can be more susceptible to damage.

The phone's one design quirk is that it's a little tall and heavy for its screen size, likely because of the extra hardware required for the head-tracking Dynamic Perspective camera; it's about as heavy as the HTC One M8 despite being smaller. It also has a hardware Home button (Fire tablets have always used software Home buttons) and a dedicated shutter button used to take pictures and launch the Firefly feature (more on that later). Rather than using an on-screen or physical Back button, Amazon has made it so that swiping up from the bottom of the screen takes you back to the previous screen, which takes a little getting used to. In certain Android apps that need it, swiping up can temporarily bring up a software Back button and a software Menu button, though Android apps that still use the old Android 2.3-era Menu button are getting fewer and farther between.

Dynamic Perspective

One of the Fire Phone's headlining features (and one of the earlier rumors about the device) is the presence of four face-and-eye-tracking sensors in the corners of the phone. These sensors enable something Amazon calls 'Dynamic Perspective,' a pseudo-3D feature that moves on-screen elements around in response to the way you move the phone and your head.

The lock screens Amazon bundles with the phone do a good job of showing the feature off. They all show the date and time embedded somewhere in a 3D rendered scene that moves around as you change your perspective. It seems pretty accurate-it never got confused and stopped working unless I tilted the phone so far that my face was out of view, and the only thing that can give it trouble is when the sensors can see multiple faces at once. This motion extends to the phone's Home screen, which subtly shifts the icons as you change your perspective, and to certain bundled apps like the Maps app.

Cool as the technology behind this is, Dynamic Perspective doesn't add much practical value to the Fire Phone, at least not yet. A feature called 'Peek' lets you tilt the phone slightly in supported apps to reveal more information (tilting it in Maps can show you Yelp reviews for restaurants, for example), which can keep the UI clean but provide helpful information without requiring a bunch of extra taps. Other apps can let you move the phone or your head around and pan across still photos instead of using your fingers to zoom and scroll. These features work fine, but the 'problems' they solve aren't very big.

Dynamic Perspective is more useful as a big, obvious differentiator that's easy to show off in a store. This does provide some value in the crowded smartphone market. Some technology buyers like it when stuff looks cool, or when they can easily show off how different their phone is from the rest of the stuff on the market. Dynamic Perspective accomplishes that goal. The tech is solid. Now we just need Amazon and its developers to figure out other, better ways to use it.

Firefly

Dynamic Perspective gets most of the attention, but Firefly is hands-down the Fire Phone's best feature, and I want it everywhere. It's your friend who can see someone in a bit part in a movie and tell you which episode of Seinfeld she had a guest spot in, or who can instantly identify any song by the opening guitar riff. Firefly isn't a core smartphone feature like, say, maps or e-mail-it just feels like a thing that technology should be able to do.

Launch Firefly by either tapping its icon on the Home screen or long-pressing the camera shutter button. The camera turns on and a swarm of small dots (the titular fireflies) flies onto the screen, and they begin flitting from object to object looking for things they can scan. They can grab phone numbers from business cards to add them to contacts or focus on long URLs to open them in the browser. They can even scan in QR codes. But the coolest feature actually lets you point the camera at objects.

If Firefly recognizes the object you're scanning, it can retrieve information about the object from Amazon's own product database or from third-party databases that developers make available. Admittedly, its primary use right now is scanning items and then pointing you to their Amazon product pages so you can give Amazon more money. However, Amazon mentioned that it is working with the developers of Vivino, a wine label scanner available on the iOS App Store and Google Play (as well as from Amazon), to integrate its functionality into Firefly, allowing the phone to find information about wines based on their labels. The number of things that can be scanned (and the kinds of things that can be done with that data) will continue to improve if more developers get on board.

When scanning objects, Firefly has the easiest time identifying boxes or other packaging with easily distinguishable logos or art. It can occasionally figure out 'naked' box-less game cartridges, discs, or memory cards, but it's usually not great at it. And if it's not sold on Amazon, forget about it (this was the case with a store-brand box of cereal I tried to scan, and some Rite Aid-brand hand soap and dish detergent). Here are some of the things I was able to scan successfully using the feature as it comes out of the box:

The other end of Firefly is its media scanning capability, which it does by listening to whatever song or TV show or movie is playing. The phone was usually able to identify media within just a few seconds. It works even better when Amazon has extensive X-Ray data on whatever it is that you're watching-while watching an episode of The Sopranos with my fiancée, for example, Firefly was able to identify which episode we were watching, exactly where we were in the episode, and every actor participating in the scene whether they were a series regular or some extra who never showed up again.

Like product-based Firefly scanning, media scanning for now is much more reliable when the media is stored in Amazon's video library. Trying to make it identify The Simpsons episodes on DVDs was fruitless, even though it properly identified a song from an episode. The media scanning is mostly just a direct link to Amazon's various media stores at this point, and it will rely on third-party developers to extend it beyond that. IMDB integration lets you tap your actors to see what else they've been in. iHeartRadio has added a feature that allows users to create radio stations based on songs scanned in Firefly, and Amazon said it only took a day to create that plugin.

Firefly is the one Fire Phone feature you'll want on any phone you're currently using. Let's hope that it gets enough developer support that it isn't just a link to Amazon's storefronts.