Amazon Fire Phone

Amazon Fire Phone.

From the Press Release:

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Jun. 18, 2014– (NASDAQ: AMZN)—Amazon today unveiled Fire, the first smartphone designed by Amazon. Fire is the only smartphone with Dynamic Perspective and Firefly, two new breakthrough technologies that allow you to see and interact with the world through a whole new lens.

Amazon Fire Phone

Amazon Fire Phone will be released on July 25, 2014 and pre-order is available now.

Notable Specs:

  • 5.5″ x 2.6″ x 0.35″ (139.2mm x 66.5mm x 8.9mm)
  • 4.7-inch LCD Display
  • 1280 x 720 resolution at 315 ppi
  • 13 MP rear-facing camera
  • 2.1 MP front-facing camera
  • 32 GB or 64 GB storage
  • Micro USB 2.0
  • 3.5mm headphone
  • Nano SIM-card tray
  • UMTS/HSPA+/DC-HSDPA (850, 900, 1700/2100, 1900, 2100 MHz), Quad-band GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz), 9 bands of LTE (Bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 17, 20), supports carrier aggregation
  • 2.2GHz Quad-core Snapdragon 800 CPU, with Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB of RAM

For a limited time, Amazon includes one full year of Prime. Existing Prime members will have their membership extended for another year.

Pricing:

  • $199 for 32GB model with 2-year AT&T contract
  • $399 for 64GB model with 2-year AT&T contract
  • $649 for 32GB model without contract
  • $749 for 64GB model without contract

As a Tech enthusiast, I really want to get an Amazon Fire Phone. I want to know how this phone works, wether or not I could recommend this phone to anyone.

I have been on AT&T network for the last 4 years off-contract. I personally do not want to bound with a new contract with any phone providers anymore. My choice is to purchase an Amazon Fire Phone at full price. I am not sure if I want to spend $649 for an out of contract purchase.

iOS 8 beta 2

iOS 8 beta 2

Apple seeds iOS 8 beta 2 build 12A4297e to developers on Tuesday, June 17, 2014.

This build seems to be a lot more stable than the first iOS 8 beta which crashed at least three times within the first hour. iOS 8 beta 2 seems to be stable enough that I told my colleagues they could install it if they would.

I installed iOS 8 beta on an iPhone 5s and iPad Air instead of on older devices; they are the only 64-bit iPhone and iPad I have. Apple is going full on 64-bit with the upcoming iOS devices.

I noticed that my iPad Air rings whenever my iPhone 5s rings. It seems that phone call handoff is working between the two devices. Overall, I’m really excited with iOS 8.

OS X Yosemite Developer Preview 2

OS X Yosemite Developer Preview 2

Apple seeds OS X Yosemite Developer Preview 2 build 14A261i on Tuesday, June 17, 2014.

The first OS X Yosemite Developer Preview was too buggy for my 2010 MacBook Pro. The font doesn’t look right and I suspected that it was designed to look best on Retina Display. The support for NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M was pretty abysmal.

I have not had enough time using OS X Yosemite Developer Preview 2 to find out if it’s going to run well on older Macs. Time will tell.

“Isn’t this your picture being used?”

MacBook Air Software Reinstall USB Drive 960x540

Vondiggity sent me an email:

Isn’t this your picture being used?

http://parislemon.com/post/88864416997/best-designed-usb-stick-ever#notes

Vondiggity
http://www.vondur.com

ParisLemon is using a photo that I took

Indeed, that is definitely the photo I took. I uploaded this photo on 37prime Flickr account, dated December 20, 2010 under Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

M.G. Siegler must be too busy checking his million-dollar account balance that he doesn’t have the time to give proper attributions.

ArsTechnica used this very same photo for their article back in October 23, 2013 with attributions. (37prime)

37prime photo in Ars Technica article

Amazon Prime Music

Amazon launches Prime Music:

Your music collection just got a lot bigger.
Unlimited, ad-free streaming of over a million songs and hundreds of playlists.
And the best part is …it’s FREE with Amazon Prime.

Amazon Prime Music

On Thursday, June 11, 2014 Amazon updated its Amazon Cloud Player app and renamed it to Amazon Music.

Amazon-Cloud-Player-to-Amazon-Music

One million songs seems to be anemic compared to Spotify’s claim on 20 millions of global songs count.