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Hands-On With The Amazon Fire Phone

Kyle Russell
Frederic Lardinois
Here's one of the lock screens that takes advantage of "Dynamic Perspective." Moving your head lets you see different parts of the 3D scene.
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Here's the home screen. The "Recency Carousel" shows what you've been using, along with suggestions for related apps or a widget with useful info from the app.
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There are tilt-based gestures integrated throughout the Fire Phone's OS. A flick brings up the quick actions menu, which includes Mayday.
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A flick to the left brings shortcuts to common features, mostly focused on content.
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A further tilt shows descriptions.
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A flick to the right brings up contextual items within an app, like your recently received attachments in the email app.
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Firefly has a dedicated button on the side, and detects most products instantly.
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Tapping on the product description brings up all the ways you can pay for it through Amazon or other apps using the Firefly SDK.
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It can even recognize multiple products at once, even when one is partially obscuring another.
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When you scan something that isn't a product, it saves any useful info it can, like phone numbers or addresses.
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Firefly can also listen to music and video content as it plays, with the ability to recognize roughly a quarter of a million movies and millions of songs.
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Everything you scan is saved in a shopping cart-like list. Amazon says this isn't just for shopping, but it mostly is.
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The settings interface isn't the most intuitive. Tapping a setting name shows the description, and tapping the description shows the actual setting.
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A long press on the home button brings up voice commands, which are currently limited to placing calls or sending texts.
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Watching videos from Amazon Prime is just like on the Fire tablets. A tilt brings up X-Ray, showing information from IMDB.
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The Appstore offers what's available on the existing Fire store as well as apps built using the phone's new SDKs.
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Amazon touted the brightness of the screen during its presentation, though we couldn't really tell the difference from an iPhone with both cranked up.
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Kyle Russell

Kyle Russell is a writer at TechCrunch. Previously, he reported on Apple, enterprise, and streaming media at Business Insider.

View Bio
Frederic Lardinois
Frederic was with TechCrunch from 2012 through 2025. He also founded SiliconFilter and wrote for ReadWriteWeb (now ReadWrite). Frederic covers enterprise, cloud, developer tools, Google, Microsoft, gadgets, transportation and anything else he finds interesting.
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