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The announcement of Amazon’s “mystery product” in Seattle last week was confirmed to be Amazon’s new smartphone—the Fire Phone. The device is tailored to be part of Amazon’s marketing engine, creating a convenient experience that ultimately encourages users to purchase products from Amazon’s sprawling online marketplace. In taking a look at Fire Phone’s key features, it’s important to think about the industry impact and how retailers can approach the future of mobile.
Features
Flow Technology.
Appropriated as “Firefly,” Fire Phone’s latest iteration of Amazon’s Flow technology, an existing iOS and Android feature, is capable of recognizing both objects in the real world and digital content like music and TV shows. Accessible as a dedicated button on the new phone, users will be able to identify over 100 million items, which includes 245,000 movies and TV episodes, 160 live TV channels, 35 million songs and 70 million products. Think of it as being able to ‘Shazam’ things instantly and be able to not only purchase directly from Amazon, but also perform mobile search to recognize art, signs, posters, magazines or business cards and more. Firefly also let users send emails, save contacts, or go to a website without typing a URL. Just as music fans can “Shazam” songs, Amazon will coin its own neologism for everything else—“Firefly it.”
Leveraging showrooming.
What allows the Fire Phone to stand apart from others is its ability to convert shoppers to purchase from Amazon. AdAge called it an “enhanced shopping tool” and CBS cited early reviews that dubbed it a “mobile cash register.” Despite retailers taking the next step to provide enhanced in-store customer experiences in an attempt to stop showrooming, Amazon is appealing to the savvy, price-conscious mobile consumer. With Firefly, users can actively engage in the showrooming process by “Firefly-ing” products and immediately compare Amazon product prices via the Fire Phone native app. Ultimately, users can enjoy reduced friction in the path to purchase.
Seamless integration with everything in the user’s environment.
Punchkick strategist, Chris Losacco, provides insight on the in-store retail capabilities of Fire Phone in comparison to iBeacon. According to Chris, Amazon’s Firefly functionality was designed from the ground up to be easy for the consumer to use and to funnel them towards Amazon, rather than Apple’s goal of endearing retailers or event promoters to the Apple ecosystem within the pretense of helping them connect to consumers.
In terms of comparing Amazon Fire Phone’s price comparison search engine with Apple’s iBeacon, Chris explains that both focus on bridging on and offline experiences. In the case of iBeacon, the retailer can choose what it wants shoppers to be aware of, bring online tools into the offline experience with fantastic efficiency, and learn more about users along the way. With Firefly, Amazon is trying to convince users to purchase the product on Amazon, by completely shifting the offline experience into the online world, while learning more about the user. In the end, these technologies come from completely different standpoints in terms of partner benefits, but the primary goal for companies like Amazon is to learn more about its consumers to rapidly move forward the concept of the “connected world.”
Dynamic Perspective.
Amazon’s new sensor system recognizes where a user’s head is relative to the device and allows control of the phone without the use of your hands. According to the company’s press release, Fire Phone’s users will be able to enjoy an immersive experience that features one-handed gestures, apps and games, and an enhanced carousel.
Industry Impact
As an industry, mobile is approached as an engine for passive content consumption, content creation, and commerce. Amazon’s Fire Phone indicates a big shift in mobile that now grapples with mobile commerce in an attempt to reach a new platform—the Internet of things.
Many of the the things shoppers can do when shopping online can already be completed on a phone. The idea of shopping competitively isn’t new, nor is the idea of showrooming from a smartphone, but Amazon is looking beyond mobile to bet on what the next computing platform will be...
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