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

You fought hard and you saved and earned. But all of it's going to burn...

Straightforward to use - and it plugs into your Amazon gumble

Once you get your head around what swipes, swivels and tilts of the phone do - for instance, a swipe up the screen will move whatever is being displayed back a step, while a tilt left or right will bring a context dependent menu into view - then Fire OS is really no more or less intuitive than any other mobile OS. I found the various single-handed gestures easy to master and useful.

Amazon Fire Phone's Firefly app. Pic: Alun Taylor

The Amazon-as-content-provider side of things hoves into view via the content sidebar. Slide this out and you’ll see a list of all the stuff you’ve bought from Jeff or stored in his cloud. Apps, games, videos, books, docs, all your Amazon Prime stuff. As a way of accessing your media it works a treat and brings us to the very core of the Fire Phone conundrum. If you have a load of content bought from or stored with Amazon it’s worth having. If you don’t, it isn’t. Simple as that.

Being snuggled up to Amazon is important to get the most out of the Fire Phone’s ID-everything facility called Firefly. Launch the app and point the camera at something - a picture, a URL, a phone number, a bar code, and Amazon will tell you what it is. It works with music and video too. If it’s a purchasable item you get pointed to said item on Amazon.

For music and images I found Firefly to be reliable but the video ID feature is a bit hit and miss. Listening to the soundtrack (it doesn’t actually look at video) it identified Star Trek: Into Darkness and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet in short order but Withnail & I it knew not. So up yours, grandad!

Other interesting software features include the Mayday live online help facility which we’ve already seen on Kindle Fire tablets. It is pretty handy for smartphone newbies but I suspect it's as useful as tits on a boar to the average Reg reader. And X-Ray, a bit of code that brings up IMDb-sourced information relating to the actors appearing in a given scene of any video streamed from Amazon. X-Ray is genuinely useful.

Amazon Fire Phone maps. Pic: Alun Taylor

HERE turn-by-turn maps are part of the Fire Phone package

The big issue with Fire OS is neither its feature suite nor the the absence of Google’s apps because the Fire OS mapping and navigation, e-mail, music, photography andother apps are more than good enough just as long as you are not already heavily invested in Google’s (or anyone else's) cloud services.

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