Amazon's oddball 3D smartphone
The ruthlessly competitive smartphone market is dominated by Apple and Samsung, with former front runners like Nokia and BlackBerry now relegated to the status of has-beens, so Amazon is brave to launch its own smartphone. And this is a particularly bold move because Amazon’s Fire Phone is the quirkiest, most distinctive phone we’ve seen in a long time.
Fire OS
Like the Kindle Fire range of tablets, the Fire Phone runs Amazon’s heavily customised version of Android, called Fire OS. The interface is easy to get to grips with, but is clunky in places. The homescreen is dominated by a huge carousel that scrolls horizontally. It shows your most recently used apps, and below' each icon there’s a list of shortcuts specific to that app. For example, the email app shows you a list of your most recent messages, while below the browser you see a list of your most frequently visited websites - tap the item to go straight to it.
This is all well and good, but the carousel takes up a lot of space and quickly becomes unwieldy once you’ve opened more than a handful of apps. What’s more annoying, icons for most third party apps don’t show a list of shortcuts. Instead they suggest more apps you might like to buy. This makes the homescreen feel more like an intrusive advertising billboard at times.
Swipe up on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen to see a grid displaying all your apps. Swiping from the right of the screen (or tilting the phone to the left) shows you a handy summary' of the weather, your upcoming appointments and any unread emails. Swiping from the left, (or tilting the phone to the right) shows you a list of tabs that let you access other content, such as videos and ebooks, whether they’re stored on your phone or in the cloud, as long as they’ve been bought from Amazon.
The grid listing all your apps quickly becomes overwhelming because there’s no way to sort it, and creating folders to organise apps is a fiddly process. Meanwhile, the tilt gestures should make the 5in phone easier to use for those with smaller hands because it negates the need to reach across the width of the screen with your fingers. However, it requires a very' precise wrist action that we struggled with. We often resorted to using the touchscreen instead.
A bigger problem is the selection of apps. Google Play isn’t available, so you’re reliant on Amazon’s app store. While most of the big titles (such as Facebook and BBC iPlayer) are present, the very latest apps arrive on Google Play first. Amazon’s apps are usually a version or two behind those on Google’s store. The Fire Phone’s operating system isn’t all bad though. Like the Kindle Fire HDX tablets, it has the useful Mayday video help service.
3D and Firefly
One reason Amazon customised Android so substantially was so it could include some unique features. The most eye-catching of these is what Amazon calls Dynamic Perspective. This creates a 3D effect with the illusion of depth that you can see without having to wear special glasses. It does this by using four tiny cameras, embedded into the border surrounding the screen, that track your eye and head movements. The onscreen graphics then change instantaneously in response to these movements to show you a different perspective. This is prominently used on the lock screen, where you can see 3G CGI vistas of ancient Egyptian temples and volcanic landscapes, for example.
There are more practical uses of Dynamic Perspective, but they’re all flawed. You can create your own virtual 3D photographs, but to achieve a realistic effect you have to take lots of photos. Each successive photo needs to be slightly different from the previous one, which are then all combined into a single 3D photo. This is fiddly and time-consuming to do. Dynamic Perspective is also used in some apps, such as the Maps app (see right) where more information about landmarks are revealed as you move your head. During our test, this was far too easy to activate accidentally, especially when we were walking down the street, making it intrusive and annoying.
Firefly is a feature that tries to make shopping easier. When you’re shopping, press and hold the camera button on the side of the phone, point the camera at something you’d like to buy and Firefly should recognise it and take you to the listing for it on Amazon, so you can buy it without the hassle of typing or searching. It worked best for us when the object we were photographing had few other distracting items around it. But even then it worked fitfully. For example, it mistook a Kindle Fire tablet for a tablet case.
Hardware and call quality
While the Fire Phone’s software is a mixed bag at best, its hardware is generally more impressive. While it looks plain, its glass back and rubber-coated metal frame make the phone feel very sturdy, if a little heavy. The 4.7in screen looks sharp thanks to its 720p resolution and is bright with very good contrast and colour accuracy.
The touchscreen was by and large very responsive, while the 2GB of memory and Snapdragon quad-core processor made short work of our demanding benchmark tests. The 13-megapixel camera was far less impressive, though. Shots in broad daylight suffered from a soft focus, while colours often looked either over- or undersaturated. Photos taken in dimly lit conditions were far too blurry and full of noise.
Call quality on O2’s network in central London was generally very good. Callers reported that our voice sounded loud and clear, and that background noise from a nearby building site was almost completely filtered out. Our only niggle was that caller’s voices sounded a touch harsh and high-pitched to us. The Fire Phone’s battery lasted a lengthy 12 hours when playing videos on a loop, but it wasn’t as impressive when used for calls, browsing the web, GPS and taking photos on O2’s 4G network. In this more demanding test, it only lasted a below-average 22 hours.
Conclusion
The Amazon Fire Phone has many interesting and ambitious features, but almost all of them fall flat. This is a real shame, especially because some of them have been designed to make the large 5in phone more comfortable to use for people with small hands. We could’ve forgiven these flaws at a lower price, but the Fire Phone is expensive for an Amazon device. It costs £399 without a contract and even then it’s still locked to O2 (unlocking it for use on other networks costs another £15). We hope Amazon keeps at it, but for now you’re better off with another smartphone.
VERDICT
A phone with lots of unique and unusual features, but most of them are half-baked
SPECIFICATIONS
4.7in 1280x720-pixel touchscreen • 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor • 2GB memory • 32GB storage • 4G • Nano SIM • Fire OS 3.6 • 160g • 139x67x9mm (HxWxD) • Two-year warranty