The Amazon Fire Phone is now officially available for purchase in the UK, as carrier O2 has started offering phones and contracts from Amazon.
While Amazon has a very good reputation worldwide and its Kindle lineup of tablets have enjoyed great success, the company has yet to get a real hold of the smartphone market. The Fire Phone is Amazon's very first smartphone, marking the company's entrance to a highly-competitive field.
The Amazon Fire Phone may not have generated the great demand the company was likely hoping for, but it's nonetheless an intriguing device with some neat features and functionality to offer.
As a reminder, the Amazon Fire Phone sports a 4.7-inch display and a heavily customized user interface that makes it quite different from other Android offerings. The smartphone comes in 32GB of 64GB configurations of internal storage capacity, and O2 UK is now offering both variants.
The Fire Phone further packs a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor under the hood, paired with 2GB of memory for a fast and fluid performance and smooth multitasking. The 4.7-inch display is ultra-bright, has a 720p HD resolution, dynamic image contrast, and a wide viewing angle, and it's also designed to be easy to see in all lighting conditions, whether indoors or outdoors.
In terms of battery performance, meanwhile, the Amazon Fire Phone will last for up to 285 hours of standby time, up to 17 hours of talk time, up to 65 hours of audio playback, and up to 11 hours of video playback. The highlights of the smartphone, however, consist of its Dynamic Perspective, Firefly, and Mayday features.
The 32GB Fire Phone comes with a £400 price tag and the 64GB model costs £480, but it's worth pointing out that both versions are locked to O2's network. This means that interested customers who purchase the device from O2 will not be able to switch to another network. If the full price is a bit much to chew in one bite, interested buyers can also sign up for an O2 deal that offers the smartphone on contract for no upfront cost. O2 contracts for the Amazon Fire Phone start at £28 per month. The handset also comes with one free year of Amazon Prime, worth £79.
To learn more about the Amazon Fire Phone or to purchase the handset, head over to O2's product page at this link.
