Amazon’s Fire Phone – What Nokia McLaren and WP’s 3D touch will have to deal with

If you haven’t seen it already, here’s Amazon’s Fire Phone. The main point of the device is that if shifts views/perspective for additional interaction. I’ve been interested in seeing a UI like this in a looong while and prior to this, the last example was introduced in iOS 7 with the parallax background. Try a game like BBB-Apocalypse (uses accelerometer) on your Windows Phone to see how interesting a perspective based game could be – depending on how you hold your phone, you can get different angles/views of the game. Nokia’s HERE Maps does this in a more extreme way too with different features when you hold the phone in different ways.

In Fire Phone, the phone uses the four front facing cameras to follow your head position and adjusts accordingly.

Check out Amazon’s official promo which looks very cheesy in some parts.

Oh yeah, it doesn’t look like the N9/Lumia, that was indeed just the outer shell. It’s interesting to see that the protective case would look very Nokia like, even down to the industrial screws at the end. Of course, to have some sort of protection, there’d be Nokia influence.

It turns out, it looks slightly like an iPhone.

Dynamic Perspective vs Accelerometer in a game. I’m sure you can accomplish the same thing with just the accelerometer in terms of being able to view different parts of the same room, but it’s whether the interaction of moving your hand or moving your head would be more comfortable.

The main function of this phone is to be more of a portal to Amazon, complete with Bing-Vision like pulling of real world data (books/cds) with ‘FireFly’ that can then direct you to that product at the Amazon store. Speaking of Amazon Store, you get 1 Year Amazon Prime with this device.

It’s an interesting new phone from Amazon. Some of the comments are already a bit dubious about it (though I guess they should give it a go before having a final verdict). What might make it more difficult are that the specs don’t exactly tie in with that $649-749 price without contract. 4.7″ 720p screen with Snapdragon 800.

So, when it comes to Nokia McLaren with 3D touch, it seems vitally important that it comes out all guns blazing. The 3D interaction has to be impressive whilst being properly useful in day to day activities, bringing something that you realise after using it, you couldn’t really do without. The combination of dynamic perspective and 3D touch could have been pretty cool or perhaps a bit too much eh?

TheVerge’s hands on.

Mashable Hands on

CNET – demo on the stage by Jeff Bezos

The one handed scroll thing kinda looks a bit naff here.

I can only assume it might look as good as this when you use it. This is from 2007.

The whole Press Conference.

Category: Nokia