Plump for a contract and the 32GB model is free if you pay a minimum of £28 per month, or £23 per month with a £40 up-front cost for the smartphone. If you want the 64GB model, the minimum price is £33 (with no up-front fee), or you can pay £90 for the phone and get a £23-per-month contract.
Even at the lower prices, the Fire phone has some tough competition. You can buy an iPhone 5C for £319 (albeit the 8GB model), or an LG G3 for under £300. In terms of hardware, the Fire Phone is very much mid-range. It has a 4.7in IPS display – the same size as the iPhone 6 – with a resolution of 1280×720 pixels, giving it a pixel density of 312ppi. That’s good, but not great in the current market. (The iPhone 6 has an unusual resolution of 1334×750 which gives it a slightly higher “Retina” pixel density of 326ppi.) It pairs a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 CPU with 2GB RAM, so performance is decent. As we’ve said, there’s a choice of 32GB or 64GB of stoage but there’s no storage expansion slot. An onboard Adreno 330 GPU takes care of graphical duties.
It’s a 4G LTE handset, with GPRS, EDGE, 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, NFC and USB connecivity via a microUSB 2.0 port. It also has stereo speakers and both front and rear-facing cameras. The latter is a 13Mp camera capturing 4128×3096 pixels and has optical image stabilisation, autofocus and an LED flash. It can capture 1080p video at 30fps, and there’s a front-facing 2.1Mp camera for selfies and video calls. If it had an aluminium band around the edge, the design would be reminiscent of the iPhone 4, since the Fire phone has flush glass front and rear panels. It also has a top-mounted headphone socket and sleep/wake button.
There are no buttons on the right-hand side but on the left are volume and a dual-purpose camera/Firefly button (we’ll come to that in a moment). At the bottom is a microUSB port for easy charging and synching, and there’s a physical home button below the screen. Stereo speakers hide behind grilles on the top and bottom edges, and produce decent audio with good stereo separation. It’s a fairly chunky device, weighing 158g and being – as near as makes no difference – 9mm. The only thing we don’t like is that the four courner-mounted sensors – which look just like the front-facing camera – are very obvious, and make the phone a little messy looking.
Selecting an item from the carousel displays context-sensitive options below it. Stop the carousel on the Silk web browser, for example, and you’ll see a short list of recently visited websites. Rotate it to the camera and recent photos are shown, go to a game or app and you might see recent achievements or settings or options. You get the idea. What’s not quite as obvious is that you can swipe in from the right-hand side to display upcoming calendar appointments, a weather forecast and your ‘VIP’ contacts. Swipe in from the left and you get a new version of the menu bar which runs across the top on a Fire tablet, letting you quickly jump to your music, videos, photos, apps, games, documents. For example, BBC iPlayer, Whatsapp, Real Racing 3, Waze, Just Eat, Fitbit and even the Nest smart thermostat app are all there ready to install for free. However, try to match the full set of apps you have on your iPhone or Android smartphone and you’ll quickly find holes. One feature which you won’t find on a Kindle Fire tablet is Firefly. Firefly is the principal reason for the Fire Phone existing, and has been described as ‘Shazam for the real world’. Using Firefly you can take pictures of just about anything, and the Fire Phone will extract the useful information in a semantic style. See a product you like, take a picture, and buy it. Firefly uses the camera app to identify music, movies, TV episodes, books, games, DVDs and other products. It can also recognise printed text such as web addresses, email addresses and phone numbers, and let you tap to go directly to the website, send an email or call a number without typing a digit. The way it works is by sensing the position of your head relative to the screen, so moving your head or tilting the smartphone itself shifts the image on screen. There’s a limited amount of movement, so you can peer to the right or left, up or down to see detail and objects that were previously off screen. In some apps (or the lock screen) it’s almost like there’s a larger screen hidden inside, and you’re looking through a smaller aperture at it, seeing only a portion at one time. It’s very odd. From volume sliders and toggle switches to app icons, it seems that 3D is order of the day. Even menu text is 3D, which is just about ok for large fonts, but it just makes smaller text look blurry and quickly induces a headache. There are a couple of pre-installed games which use Dynamic Perspective to good effect, although these appealed only to our child testers.
There are 3D outlines of buildings, as with Google maps, but only a few landmarks, such as the Gherkin, BT tower and Shard with textures. You can get driving and walking directions, as well as for public transport.
Dynamic Perspective isn’t a must-have feature in a smartphone, but we do like the gestures. In virtually every app, you can swipe in from the right or left – sometimes both – to show menus and other context-sensitive information or options. These can be invoked by tilting the phone left or right, and dismissed by tilting the other way. It works reliably, too. If you rotate the phone left or right (the swivel gesture), this displays the control centre offering quick access to the torch, Mayday – the live tech support service – and notifications.
If a contact’s name is an usual spelling, speaking the full name – including surname – ensures the transcription is correct.
Camera quality is increasingly important as smartphones take over from traditional digital cameras. The specs are respectable: 13Mp on the rear, with optical stabilisation, and 2.1Mp at the front. While the front snapper is nothing special – it’s fine for the odd selfie and Skype chats – the rear is pretty good. Images have realistic colours and are generally sharp and detailed. It’s only when you zoom in and scrutinise quality that you’ll find a lot of compression and smudgy textures. Plus, the quality in low light isn’t great. Here’s our usual shot of St Pancras, resized to 1200 pixels but otherwise unedited. Click it to enlarge:
Here’s a 100 per cent crop of the original version of the photo above so you can see the soft detail (you can’t click to enlarge as this is actual size)
The Fire phone can take a decent photo if you try hard: this is a cropped image which show it is capable of sharp detail and reasonable macro.
In low light, though, there’s a lot of noise (click to enlarge and see it better):
Video is good, too, and the stabilisation works a treat. Don’t try cinematic pans, though, as the system tries to keep the image still, resulting in jerky footage. Ultimately, the obvious conclusion is that you’re better off with an Android smartphone such as the LG G3. See also: the best Android smartphones you can buy right now Jim has been testing and reviewing products for over 20 years. His main beats include VPN services and antivirus. He also covers smart home tech, mesh Wi-Fi and electric bikes.
