It seems that e-commerce giant Amazon is looking to extend its line of offerings beyond the Kindle range and is set to enter the smart phone battle with a 4.7 inch flagship phone. Rumors have been flying around and tech blog BGR have led the way on pre-release info, offering pictures of the rumored device being seen inside a protective case.
Now they have followed up with an even clearer image, displaying a high quality rendering of the phone:amazonphone
Whilst the Amazon phone may look like a cross breed of a Samsung Galaxy and an iPhone, it plans to set itself apart from the competition with never seen before features, thinking outside the box to today’s standard smart phone. As for the normal specs of smart phones, BGR reports that their sources say,”the device will feature specs including a 4.7-inch display with 720p HD resolution, a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 2GB of RAM, six individual camera modules and a highly customized version of Google’s Android operating system similar to the one seen on Amazon’s various Kindle Fire tablets.”
Now for the new stuff.
If you look closely at the picture you can make out a camera at each of the corners on the front face. These cameras are said to be infra-red and detect head movement of the user, that will be able to offer 3D effects in a way never seen before in a smart phone – requiring no 3D glasses. It’s said that these 3D effects will be present in several stock Amazon apps as well as some third-party apps available for download from the Amazon Appstore. Imagine 3D views of items on the Amazon online store and 3D views on the maps application.
Then there are gesture controls, which whilst we have seen before in Samsung’s Galaxy series, Amazon seems to have taken it a step beyond. Tilting the phone in one direction will display additional information without the user having to interact with buttons or the like. This allows for a great ease of use with one hand. BGR reports that tilt gestures will offer many uses, such as displaying IMDB info on movies, opening a new message in the messenger app and even the appearance of Yelp ratings on the maps app.
It seems Amazon is trying to completely rid of buttons, be them physical or touch screen and one hand control seems a feature that’s earned a lot of focus. Reports say that tilt gestures among others will completely rid of any buttons for menus or other functions.
Rumors have also begun about a data package they will offer under the name “Prime Data”, however details have been kept rather secret and no numbers or estimates have yet to receive decent confirmation.
Amazon have planned a press release themselves in the coming June with a release date sometime this summer. We’ll just have to sit tight until then, eagerly awaiting these new features and to see what else Amazon can bring to the smart phone battle.