A new feature for the Fire phone is Firefly, which works as a product reference tool. As we’ve seen in other apps in the past, you’ll be able to use Firefly in conjunction with your camera to find out what a product is, exactly, and then find ways to buy it. This works for books, CDs, URLs, QR codes and other things. Even paintings. If you decide to skip a purchase then, but want to buy it later, Firefly keeps a list of the things you’ve looked up, and you can just tap the item from that list and buy it then. Firefly will also recognize music, much like the app Shazam. Firefly makes it strikingly simple, and eerily fast, to buy pretty much anything at any given moment.
On stage, Jeff Bezos flicked the phone to the left, and an OS-level navigation drawer slid into view. As he went into an app to look at dresses, tilting the phone caused new dresses to appear, while tilting it in another direction put more information about a dress on the display. When he accessed a Washington Post article, he tilted the screen to scroll through the text, rather than scrolling with a finger on the display. Not necessarily brand new, but it seemed to work well enough on stage. Developing…
