Amazon's Fire Phone Unveiled

Amazon.com Inc(AMZN) has entered into the smartphone market with an handset called Fire Phone. it is a move aimed to battle out with current giants in the industry Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co.

According to Amazon C.E.O Jeff Bezos  the Fire Phone ,which is black with a rubber frame  and 4.7 inch display, will give consumers access to other devices and services by the company.

The phone has a 3-D viewing and image recognition technology that will make it easer for the consumers to buys items from Amazon's web store. The handset will retail at $199.99 at AT&T Inc from July 25.

Amazon has expanded from a n online book seller to a global technology giant by building a number of consumer electronics devices, including e-readers, tablets and TV set-top boxes, as a way to get its online store and digital services more directly in front of customers.   

Fire Phone will join Amazon’s ecosystem of devices so that when a consumer is watching a movie using the company’s set-top box, the phone can pull up the actors and other information about what’s being viewed through the IMDB service that is owned by the Web retailer. The smartphone will also give customers access to Amazon’s “Mayday” technology-help service.

The handset’s image-recognition technology, called “Firefly,” will let the device figure out what a customer is looking at so the user can buy the item online. It can recognize more than 100 million items, with consumers simply taking a picture of a book, DVD or other product to link back to Amazon’s store. The phone will also have audio recognition for movies and TV shows, which Amazon also carries.

                                         Pricing

A Fire Phone with 32 gigabytes of memory will cost $199.99 with a two-year wireless contract, while a 64-gigabyte version will cost $299.99. The phone was listed at $649 without a contract on Amazon’s website.

The smartphone gives Amazon a way to feature its online store and digital services for games, mobile applications, movies and music on the computing device people take with them wherever they go. Instead of having its app among the hundreds of thousands available through Apple’s App Store or Google Inc.’s Play store, Amazon’s services are the centerpiece of the new device.

While Amazon has used this strategy with its Kindle Fire tablet and Fire TV set-top box, the smartphone market is a much larger opportunity. According to researcher IDC, the number of smartphone users worldwide is quickly approaching 2 billion.