Definition: Fire Phone

An Android smartphone from Amazon.com that never took off in the market. Debuting in July 2014, the Fire was no longer available from Amazon a year later, although refurbished units have been available from third parties.

A physical Firefly button scanned book covers, album covers, QR barcodes and works of art and delivered information about the objects and their availability on Amazon.com. Firefly could also identify music, movies and TV shows and offer up the item for purchase. For novices, Mayday delivered video chat tech support, and the rep could annotate the user's phone in real time.

Also included was unlimited Amazon cloud storage for photos taken with the Fire's 13-megapixel camera. The phone could be autoscrolled by tilting it, and flipping the device rendered an auxiliary screen with more menus and functions for the app in use. Like the Fire tablets, apps came from Amazon's app store (see Fire tablet).

3D Dynamic Perspective

The Fire's four front-facing cameras created a 3D perspective as the phone was angled. In this maps app example, the building seems to pop out of the screen. (Image courtesy of Amazon.com.)