The long-rumored, long-awaited “Amazon Phone” is finally here, and it’s a doozy in more ways than one. Over the past week of testing, we’ve shown you its most fun features and run through its camera capabilities, and we’ve taken your questions live on the air during a special segment of the Pocketnow Weekly podcast. Now it’s time to see how our impressions of the Fire Phone have changed since our first hands-on.

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As Amazon’s own site helpfully reminds buyers, Fire is the only smartphone on the market with “Dynamic Perspective, Firefly, Mayday, and more.” It’s the only phone that gives you a year’s subscription to Amazon Prime when you buy it, the only one that “seamlessly integrates” all 33 million Amazon media titles into the day-to-day experience of using the device. It hardly needs stating that Amazon considers the Fire Phone the best way for customers to access its unique ecosystem.

But is a smoother Amazon experience enough to justify the Fire Phone’s flagship-level pricing? Can the combination of a novel interface and innovative features overcome its restricted availability and limited app ecosystem? How many times can we avoid using the phrase “playing with Fire” in a text piece of this magnitude? The answers below in our Amazon Fire Phone review!

Video Review · Specs & Hardware · Software · Camera · Performance

Pros/Cons · Pricing/Availability · Conclusion · Scored For Me

Amazon Fire Phone Review Video

Index

Software

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That feature is called Dynamic Perspective, and it makes possible the best handheld 3D effect we’ve ever seen. While the “3D screen on a smartphone” trope is one that resurfaces every few years, usually with unfortunate results, Amazon spent a lot of time and money to ensure that its implementation was best-in-class. The four corner cameras constantly track the user’s face relative to the screen, in light or in darkness, continually readjusting the display’s perspective to give the Fire Phone an almost magical aspect. The result is a fun –if at times disorienting– depth effect that also includes some practical advantages: tilting the screen reveals details otherwise hidden, like the signal strength/battery life/status bar up top, helpful descriptors on menu items, or additional information about selected items on a map.

The Fire Phone hasn’t forgotten its accelerometer in all this, either: the phone comes equipped to interpret a series of gestures meant to make one-handed use easier. On the subtle side is the tilt-to-scroll functionality in the Silk Browser and other apps: leaning the device either backward or forward causes the page to slide up or down, with the scrolling speed directly related to the degree of lean (this is something we’ve seen before, but the crucial difference is that it actually works well here). On the less-subtle side: flicking the phone quickly to the right or left brings up the side panels present all throughout the OS. This gesture tends to make you look a little funny in public, and it’s less reliable on the whole, so thankfully those panels are also accessible with a thumb-swipe in from the bezel.