“The big idea in Amazon’s first smartphone is that you can control the screen just by moving your head. Amazon’s Fire phone promises to draw you into a 3-D world where things happen without a touch,” Geoffrey A. Fowler writes for The Wall Street Journal. “But in reality, the Fire is the grown-up equivalent of a 9-year-old riding a bike with his hands in the air. ‘Look, Ma, no hands!’ It’s a neat gimmick, but it won’t get you very far.”
“The $199 phone is packed with a number of such technological bells and whistles that seem clever, for about a day,” Fowler writes. “In the past five days, I couldn’t once get the Fire’s battery to last to day’s end—a telephonic cardinal sin… In my battery torture test, which involves streaming a video over Wi-Fi with the screen at 50%, the Fire lasted just 6 hours and 40 minutes, 16% less than the Galaxy, and 25% less than the iPhone.”
“The Fire’s rear camera, which includes a lens that’s supposed to stabilize images, is close to, but not better than, the reigning champ iPhone 5S. The Fire takes photos at a higher resolution, but images of night landscapes and dark restaurants lacked the detail and natural color I could pick up with the iPhone,” Fowler writes. “I had the most hope for the Fire’s 3-D-like ‘dynamic perspective’ technology… Soon enough, though, it starts to feel like a gimmick. This flicking and nodding only worked for me only about three-quarters of the time—just ineffective enough to be a deal-breaker. ”
Read more in the full review here.
MacDailyNews Take: Garbage.
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