The massive online marketplace has finally revealed its long awaited smartphone.
After months of rumors that have been flying about a possible smartphone from the online shopping giant, the Amazon Fire has finally been unveiled by the company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos.
The mobile device features a 4.7 inch display and is presumably based on the Kindle operating system.
The Amazon Fire has an HD display and a Snapdragon 2.2 GHz quad core processor. It will become available for purchase as of July 25 and will be sold exclusively through AT&T. There will be two different versions of the smartphone available. The first will be sold for $200, and will be 32 GB. The second will be 64 GB and will be sold for $300. Those are the prices for purchasing with a two year contract. To simply buy the unlocked device, says the company’s website, the smartphone will cost $649.
Bezos gave a brief introduction to the Amazon Fire, revealing that new owners will receive a free year of Prime.
During the unveiling, Bezos stated that new owners of the Fire smartphone would be receiving a full 12 months of free Prime service, which has been valued at $99. This will provide the mobile device users with access to a broad spectrum of TV shows, movies, music, books, and products, in addition to free shipping for Amazon.com purchases.
It is assumed that the Amazon smartphone will operate on the Kindle OS, which is a variation of Google’s Android operating system, upon which the marketplace’s Kindle tablets are already based. That said, neither Bezos, himself, nor the press release from the company made any specific mention to confirm whether or not this assumption is actually true. All that it stated was that the mobile device would come with a “suite of built-in tools and Android apps.”
Among the new features that will be seen in the Amazon Fire smartphone will be the Firefly service and its Dynamic Perspective. This makes it very clear that the company is keen to use the device to better connect to its massive foundation of 250 million customers through a gadget that will make it even easier to make purchases of a virtually endless list of products online.
