裸眼3D开路，亚马逊第一款智能手机“Fire Phone”正式面市

    流言蜚语持续了几个月之后，亚马逊（Amazon）在本周三西雅图的活动上终于宣告进入智能手机市场。

    面对以媒体人为主的观众，首席执行官杰夫•贝佐斯发布了这家在线零售业巨头的最新产品：Fire Phone手机。这款手机拥有4.7英寸的屏幕，2.2GHz的四核处理器以及2GB的内存。通过手机侧面的特定按钮，用户还可以使用高达1300万像素的摄像头，同时享受亚马逊Cloud Drive云存储上的无限照片容量。

    正如传闻所说，这款手机由亚马逊与运营商美国电话电报公司（AT&T）独家合作推出，已经出现在亚马逊公司的网站上，32GB空间的两年合约机起售价为199.99美元。亚马逊还随新手机限时赠送一年的Amazon Prime会员服务。

    贝佐斯阐述了Fire Phone手机的物理参数及包括全新照片识别服务Firefly在内的部分特性后，最终证实了传闻，表示这款新产品在某种意义上拥有3D功能。贝佐斯展示了这款手机的运动追踪屏幕。它采用了“动态视角”技术，依靠在屏幕四角安装的红外摄像头，让用户不需要借助3D眼镜就能感觉到图片的三维效果。

    贝佐斯演示了如何使用这项技术，让手机上的图片看起来更加真实。同时，当用户在手机上进行在线购物时，摄像头还能根据用户的头部和面部移动情况，记录下用户浏览过哪些产品。显然，亚马逊打算利用这项技术，鼓励Amazon Prime会员多在网上购买商品。用户还可以通过倾斜手机，从而利用Fire Phone的地图软件进行导航，也可以在阅读新闻或Kindle电子书时启动“自动翻页”功能。

    周三的发布活动开始时，亚马逊的股价几乎没有什么波动，但当贝佐斯的演示完成后，股价便上涨了超过3%。

    在今年早些时候就已经有消息透露，亚马逊可能将发布搭载3D技术的手机。移动产品资讯网站BGR甚至还发布了照片，宣称照片中的就是新产品的原型机。亚马逊也在本月初推波助澜，发布了一部推广视频，其中展现了几位用户面对从未见过的新产品时的惊讶反应。视频中的人们在使用新产品时，前后摇动着脑袋，更加让人们对新手机的头部追踪技术展开了猜测。

    亚马逊对现有和潜在的Amazon Prime会员推送了Fire Phone产品的信息。他们将来可以使用这款手机观看流媒体，体验新发布的Prime Music。这是一款于本周一上线的音乐流媒体服务，让Amazon Prime用户能够享受超过100万首音乐，而不必受到广告的干扰。

    Firefly是Fire Phone手机的主要特色之一。这是一项照片识别服务，既可以识别文本和图像，也可以识别音频及视频。这项服务在手机的侧面拥有专属按钮，可以扫描电话号码、书籍甚至艺术作品，让用户得到相关信息并存储在手机中。Firefly还能识别歌曲和电视剧，或提供食物的营养信息。

    After months of rumors, Amazon finally announced its entry into the smartphone market at an event in Seattle Wednesday.

    CEO Jeff Bezos spoke to a crowd made up mostly of members of the media to announce the online retail giant’s newest product: the Fire phone, a device with a 4.7-inch screen, a quad-core 2.2 GHz processor and 2 gigabytes of RAM. The new smartphone also features a 13-megapixel camera that can be launched by pressing a designated button on the side of the phone, and Amazon is offering free, unlimited photo storage on the Amazon Cloud Drive.

    As had been rumored, the phone is being offered in an exclusive partnership with AT&T and can already be found on the company’s website, starting at a price of $199.99 for a two-year contract with the 32-gigabyte model. For a limited time, Amazon is also offering a year-long Amazon Prime membership along with the new phone.

    After offering up info about the Fire’s physical specs and some of its features, including the new image recognition service Firefly, Bezos finally confirmed rumors that the new product has 3-D capabilities, in a sense. Bezos introduced the phone’s motion-tracking screen, which uses “dynamic perspective” head-tracking technology that relies on four corner-mounted infrared cameras to make images appear to be three-dimensional without the need for 3-D glasses.

    Bezos demonstrated how that technology can be put to use, making images on the phone’s display look more realistic while also registering the user’s face and head movements to cycle through Amazon products while shopping on the phone. To be sure, Amazon is aiming the new technology at Amazon Prime members to encourage them to buy more of the company’s products online. Users will also be able to tilt the phone to navigate the Fire’s maps feature and to initiate “auto-scroll” while reading a news article or Kindle book.

    Amazon’s AMZN 2.69% stock price, which remained relatively unchanged at the start of Wednesday’s event, rose more than 3% following Bezos’ announcement.

    News of a potential Amazon smartphone with 3-D capability leaked earlier this year, with BGR even posting photos it claimed featured a prototype for the new product. Amazon added fuel to the fire earlier this month when it released a promotional video featuring several people’s amazed reactions to an unseen product. The people in the video can be seen tilting their heads back and forth while using the product, which added to speculation over the phone’s head-tracking technology.

    Amazon is pushing the Fire to current and potential Amazon Prime subscribers, who will be able to use the phone to access streaming video and thenewly-launched Prime Music, a music streaming service launched on Monday that lets Amazon Prime members listen to more than one million songs without interruption from ads.

    One of the phone’s main features is Firefly, an image recognition service that can identify text and images as well as audio and video. Bezos said users can use Firefly, which has its own designated button on the side of the device, to scan phone numbers, books and even works of art to get information and save it on the phone. Firefly can also recognize songs and television shows, or offer nutritional information for food.