Amazon drops unlocked Fire Phone price to $199
26 Nov 2014
Amazon has dropped the price of its recently-launched Fire Phone for just $199 without a contract, down from the $650 launch price, for US consumers.
However, the Fire Phone's price in the UK and Germany has not yet changed.
The phone still comes with free Prime subscription for one year, which normally sells for $99, and the Amazon Fire Phone overall would cost users just $100, which was a pretty decent deal.
On the specifications front, Amazon Fire Phone features a 4.7-inch HD display, 2.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM, NFC, 4G LTE and 2400 mAh battery.
The phone runs on Fire OS, which is based on Android 4.2.2 and does not include Google services or Play Store. The retailer offers its own Appstore with the phone.
Fire OS comes with a number of software enhancements including Dynamic Perspective, which is the Fire Phone's USP.
The feature uses four specialised cameras and four infrared LEDs built in front of the phone to provide cool utilities.
The cameras and IR LEDs tracked head movements and shift perspectives depending on user activity. Scrolling through screens can be done by simply tilting or swivelling the phone.
For normal photography the phone has a 13MP primary camera with LED flash and 2.4MP front shooter.
Comparing the Fire Phone with the iPhone 6, pcadvisor.co.uk reported the Fire Phone was different from the high-end smartphone offering excellence in media consumption and communications.
The report said Fire Phone existed primarily as a mobile way into Amazon's world of media and products. It was a way of consuming books, music, video and more via one's handset, and an easy way of purchasing physical goods from Amazon wherever one was.
Beyond this basic difference, there were plenty of similarities between the two as both Apple and Amazon tied users into their respective worlds, while the Fire Phone tied users to Amazon, iPhone users were forced into sourcing media and apps from Apple's iTunes world. The only exception to the Apple-only rule was in the world of eBooks, in which Amazon itself had the unique ability to sell to iPhone users, it said.
Thanks to the locked-down nature of both the Amazon and Apple environments, one could rest assured one was safe from virtually any kind of malware threat, pcadvisor added.
