Amazon Fire Phone makes online shopping easier

Friday, June 27, 2014 - 11:13 by Mike Price

This month Amazon pulled back the curtains on the Fire Phone, its first entry into the mobile market, which follows in the footsteps of the Kindle Fire range by helping it put smart hardware in the hands of its customers and thus encourage more of them to shop online.

On the surface, the Fire Phone is a well specified handset that can keep pace with some of the market's front-running ranges from rivals like Samsung and HTC. It has a 4.7 inch high def touchscreen display, a quad core Snapdragon 800 processor with a 2.2GHz clock speed and 2GB of RAM.

If all of that technical jargon is a bit hard for you to decipher, the long and the short of it is that the Fire Phone will not disappoint when it comes to performance. Running apps and games should be a doddle, while a 13 megapixel camera on the back should do a good job of capturing still images.

In fact, the camera could be one of the phone's most important assets, because Amazon has endowed the device with a service called Firefly, that makes great use of it.

A dedicated button for Firefly lets you turn the Fire Phone into a fully functional scanning device, which can detect and identify everything, from the TV show you are watching on the sofa to any product you see when you are out and about.

Over 70 million can be identified from Amazon's extensive online catalogue and the idea is that you no longer have to do any investigating if you see something you want to buy.

This could make shopping online from a smartphone an easier and quicker process, all while helping Amazon to sell more stock. Now all we need is for the Fire Phone to launch in the UK.