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A closer look at the Amazon Fire phone (pictures)

Amazon's first smartphone is here. It has a 3D screen and it comes with a slew of Amazon Prime features.

Sarah Mitroff
Sarah Mitroff is a Managing Editor for CNET, overseeing our health, fitness and wellness section. Throughout her career, she's written about mobile tech, consumer tech, business and startups for Wired, MacWorld, PCWorld, and VentureBeat.
Sarah Mitroff
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Meet the Amazon Fire phone

Here it is, the much-anticipated smartphone from Amazon. Dubbed the Fire Phone, it sports midrange specs, including a 2.2GHz processor and a 13-megapixel camera.

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Dynamic Perspective

Confirming earlier rumors, the Fire Phone has a 3D-like screen. Amazon calls it Dynamic Perspective: basically, as you move the phone in your hand, the elements of the operating system on the screen move to create the appearance of depth.

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3D-like

A great example of the Dynamic Perspective technology is on a map. You can see a 3D rendering of a building, and tilt your phone to see that rendering move on the screen.

In other apps, you can tilt your phone to rotate images or scroll through text.

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Four cameras

To achieve the 3D effect of Dynamic Perspective, there are four corner cameras on the front of the device, each with an infrared light to combat the dark, and also a huge image database to "train" the tool's algorithms.

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Sleek design

It's tough to see here, but in design the new phone looks like a cross between the iPhone and the Nexus 5.

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Durable build

The Fire Phone is protected by Gorilla Glass 3, which allegedly makes it scratch-resistant. A rubber-coated frame helps protect it from bumps and falls.

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Bright enough for sunlight

The Fire Phone's screen boasts 590 nits, a measure of brightness, which allows you to read it outside.

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Solid steel connectors

The USB connector on the device is designed to feel solid and stable, cutting down on the wobbly feeling you might get when you plug a cable into your phone for charging.

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What's inside?

Powering the Fire Phone are a quad-core 2.2GHz processor, Adreno 330 graphics processor, and 2GB of RAM.

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Camera specs

The camera plays an important role on the Fire Phone, beyond just snapping photos. It's a 13-megapixel model with optical image stablization, which helps you take sharper shots.

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Dedicated camera button

Like many Windows Phone devices, the Fire Phone has a dedicated camera button for taking photos quickly.

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Camera shootout

Amazon couldn't help but compare its phone in terms of photo prowess to the iPhone 5S and Samsung Galaxy S5. Amazon says its phone wins out.

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Dolby sound

For a surround-sound effect, the Fire Phone has dual stereo speakers from Dolby.

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Firefly

A new service introduced with Fire Phone is called Firefly. It's a mix of Google Now, Siri, and a bar code scanner. You'll be able to search for products by snapping a photo of them, search for music by playing it into the microphone, and more. The phone has a dedicated button to launch the service.

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Snap and shop

With Firefly, you can take a photo of a product in a store or at home to quickly find it on Amazon.

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Listening in

Firefly can listen to music to identify songs and help you find them.

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Help!

Amazon's Mayday feature is baked in to the Fire Phone. Introduced last year with the new Kindle Fire tablets, Mayday connects you with a customer service representative if you need help on your device.

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Tangle-free

As an extra perk, you get a set of tangle-free headphones with the phone.

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Unlimited storage

Using Amazon Cloud Storage, you'll have unlimited storage space for all of the photos you shoot with the phone.

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Operating system

Like the Kindle Fire tablets, the Fire Phone's operating system has a carousel of apps and widgets at the top of screen, with a row of app icons at the bottom.

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