What's MISSING on Amazon Fire Phone... and why it WON'T set the world alight

Get a grip on that rubber

On the plus side it’s a very solid and well-made device and the rubberised polyurethane frame makes it easy, and comfortable, to hold. The control layout is conventional but highly functional and the oblong iPhone-esque home button below the screen has a very satisfying action.

Mobe-esque: That home button looks familiar to both fanbois and fandroids alike...

There’s a speaker at both ends of the handset firing out of a grill next to the audio and micro USB port respectively. The sound they make is good, if not exceptional.

The battery, all 2,400mAh of it, is fixed in place and there is no storage expansion so you have to make do with the 32 or 64GB built-in depending on model. My 32GB device showed just shy of 25GB free. Connectivity is taken care by a 4G/LTE cellular radio, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, an NFC chip and Bluetooth, though the last is only v3.0. Phone calls made with the Fire sounded fine.

Running the show is a 2.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Krait chip and accompanying Adreno 330 GPU with 2GB of RAM. It’s actually a Snapdragon 800 chipset, rather than an 801 component – let alone an 805. That’s not to say the Fire Phone isn’t a slick and powerful device, it is, but you are still paying top dollar for a rather dated chipset.

The cameras are the strongest part of the hardware offering. The 13MP rear shooter may not sound like much but the f/2.0 lens produces some pretty decent results and the optical image stabilisation pays real dividends in low light even if the focus speed takes a knock. The camera interface is very, very simple - basically you have a choice of HDR on or off when it comes of picture settings. The Fire has a dedicated camera button on the left which also launches Firefly, about which more below.

Nice 'n' easy: The Fire Phone's camera interface is dead simple to use

As for that 2,400mAh battery, it'll easily get you through the full day and then some on a full charge – or let you watch a high definition video for just over seven and a half hours. That’s nothing to get too excited about at the arse end of 2014.