The Amazon Fire Phone will share many characteristics found in other Amazon devices. The home screen will have a carousel of recently accessed apps, for instance. There's also X-Ray for supplemental content and Mayday for live tech support.
Competing won't be easy, though. Amazon is arriving late to a tightly contested marketplace. Samsung and Apple dominate worldwide smartphone sales with a combined 46 percent share, according to IDC. And in the U.S., Apple leads with more than 37 percent, with Samsung at nearly 29 percent.
Amazon has tried to chip away at Apple's top position in the tablet market with its Kindle Fire HDXtablet, which beats the iPad Air's screen resolution and is lighter and cheaper. Still, the iPad dominates the category while Amazon has seen its market share shrink from 7 percent in 2012 to 2 percent in the first quarter of this year.
As the phone was announced in Seattle, Amazon's stock rose $8.82, or 3 percent, to $334.44 in afternoon trading.
Here's a look at the Amazon Fire Phone:
Specifications and features
With a new Firefly feature, snap a photo of a book title, and it'll show you where to buy it. Listen to a song playing in the background, and it'll direct you to that tune on Amazon. It can even direct you to knowledge, such as pulling up a Wikipedia entry on a painting you snapped. The feature will also let you snap bar codes, phone numbers and more.
With a new Firefly feature, snap a photo of a book title, and it'll show you where to buy it. Listen to a song playing in the background, and it'll direct you to that tune on Amazon. It can even direct you to knowledge, such as pulling up a Wikipedia entry on a painting you snapped. The feature will also let you snap bar codes, phone numbers and more.
The Fire Phone is smaller than leading Android phones, but larger than Apple's iPhone. CEO Jeff Bezos calls the screen, measuring 4.7 inches diagonally, ideal for one-handed use.
Bezos touts the camera on the new phone. He says it has image stabilization to counteract shaking as people take shots. Amazon is offering unlimited free storage on its Cloud Drive service.
The Fire Phone will come with earbuds that have flat cords and magnets to clasp them together, so tangled cords will be history.
Bezos says images are typically flat - and Amazon wants to change that. You can rotate the phone around and get a different view depending on your angle of vision. He says the phone is basically redrawing the image 60 times per second. Bezos calls this "dynamic perspective."
To make that happen, the Fire Phone has four front-facing infrared cameras to tell where your head is, even if your fingers happen to cover two of them.
There's an auto-scroll feature that lets you scroll down by tilting the phone. Samsung's Galaxy phones have that, too.
Availability
AT&T will be the exclusive carrier for the new phone. It's a similar approach to what Apple took when it unveiled its first iPhone in 2007. AT&T had exclusive rights to the iPhone in the U.S. until 2011, when Verizon and eventually others got it, too.
AT&T will be the exclusive carrier for the new phone. It's a similar approach to what Apple took when it unveiled its first iPhone in 2007. AT&T had exclusive rights to the iPhone in the U.S. until 2011, when Verizon and eventually others got it, too.
The phone will be available July 25. People can start ordering them Wednesday at $200 for a base model with 32 gigabytes and $300 for 64 gigabytes. Both require two-year service contracts.
The phone comes with 12 months of Prime membership, which is normally $99 a year. Existing Prime members will get their term extended.