裸眼3D開路 亞馬遜第一款智能手機Fire Phone正式面市

After months of rumors, Amazon finally announced its entry into the smartphone market at an event in Seattle Wednesday.

流言蜚語持續了幾個月之後，亞馬遜（Amazon）在本週三西雅圖的活動上終於宣告進入智能手機市場。

CEO Jeff Bezos spoke to a crowd made up mostly of members of the media to announce the online retail giant’s newest product: the Fire phone, a device with a 4.7-inch screen, a quad-core 2.2 GHz processor and 2 gigabytes of RAM. The new smartphone also features a 13-megapixel camera that can be launched by pressing a designated button on the side of the phone, and Amazon is offering free, unlimited photo storage on the Amazon Cloud Drive.

面對以媒體人爲主的觀衆，首席執行官傑夫o貝佐斯發佈了這家在線零售業巨頭的最新產品：Fire Phone手機。這款手機擁有4.7英寸的屏幕，2.2GHz的四核處理器以及2GB的內存。通過手機側面的特定按鈕，用戶還可以使用高達1300萬像素的攝像頭，同時享受亞馬遜Cloud Drive雲存儲上的無限照片容量。

As had been rumored, the phone is being offered in an exclusive partnership with AT&T and can already be found on the company’s website, starting at a price of $199.99 for a two-year contract with the 32-gigabyte model. For a limited time, Amazon is also offering a year-long Amazon Prime membership along with the new phone.

正如傳聞所說，這款手機由亞馬遜與運營商美國電話電報公司（AT&T）獨家合作推出，已經出現在亞馬遜公司的網站上，32GB空間的兩年合約機起售價爲199.99美元。亞馬遜還隨新手機限時贈送一年的Amazon Prime會員服務。

After offering up info about the Fire’s physical specs and some of its features, including the new image recognition service Firefly, Bezos finally confirmed rumors that the new product has 3-D capabilities, in a sense. Bezos introduced the phone’s motion-tracking screen, which uses “dynamic perspective” head-tracking technology that relies on four corner-mounted infrared cameras to make images appear to be three-dimensional without the need for 3-D glasses.

貝佐斯闡述了Fire Phone手機的物理參數及包括全新照片識別服務Firefly在內的部分特性後，最終證實了傳聞，表示這款新產品在某種意義上擁有3D功能。貝佐斯展示了這款手機的運動追蹤屏幕。它採用了“動態視角”技術，依靠在屏幕四角安裝的紅外攝像頭，讓用戶不需要藉助3D眼鏡就能感覺到圖片的三維效果。

Bezos demonstrated how that technology can be put to use, making images on the phone’s display look more realistic while also registering the user’s face and head movements to cycle through Amazon products while shopping on the phone. To be sure, Amazon is aiming the new technology at Amazon Prime members to encourage them to buy more of the company’s products online. Users will also be able to tilt the phone to navigate the Fire’s maps feature and to initiate “auto-scroll” while reading a News article or Kindle book.

貝佐斯演示瞭如何使用這項技術，讓手機上的圖片看起來更加真實。同時，當用戶在手機上進行在線購物時，攝像頭還能根據用戶的頭部和麪部移動情況，記錄下用戶瀏覽過哪些產品。顯然，亞馬遜打算利用這項技術，鼓勵Amazon Prime會員多在網上購買商品。用戶還可以通過傾斜手機，從而利用Fire Phone的地圖軟件進行導航，也可以在閱讀新聞或Kindle電子書時啓動“自動翻頁”功能。

Amazon’s AMZN 2.69% stock price, which remained relatively unchanged at the start of Wednesday’s event, rose more than 3% following Bezos’ announcement.

週三的發佈活動開始時，亞馬遜的股價幾乎沒有什麼波動，但當貝佐斯的演示完成後，股價便上漲了超過3%。

News of a potential Amazon smartphone with 3-D capability leaked earlier this year, with BGR even posting photos it claimed featured a prototype for the new product. Amazon added fuel to the fire earlier this month when it released a promotional video featuring several people’s amazed reactions to an unseen product. The people in the video can be seen tilting their heads back and forth while using the product, which added to speculation over the phone’s head-tracking technology.

在今年早些時候就已經有消息透露，亞馬遜可能將發佈搭載3D技術的手機。移動產品資訊網站BGR甚至還發布了照片，宣稱照片中的就是新產品的原型機。亞馬遜也在本月初推波助瀾，發佈了一部推廣視頻，其中展現了幾位用戶面對從未見過的新產品時的驚訝反應。視頻中的人們在使用新產品時，前後搖動着腦袋，更加讓人們對新手機的頭部追蹤技術展開了猜測。

Amazon is pushing the Fire to current and potential Amazon Prime subscribers, who will be able to use the phone to access streaming video and thenewly-launched Prime Music, a music streaming service launched on Monday that lets Amazon Prime members listen to more than one million songs without interruption from ads.

亞馬遜對現有和潛在的Amazon Prime會員推送了Fire Phone產品的信息。他們將來可以使用這款手機觀看流媒體，體驗新發布的Prime Music。這是一款於本週一上線的音樂流媒體服務，讓Amazon Prime用戶能夠享受超過100萬首音樂，而不必受到廣告的干擾。

One of the phone’s main features is Firefly, an image recognition service that can identify text and images as well as audio and video. Bezos said users can use Firefly, which has its own designated button on the side of the device, to scan phone numbers, books and even works of art to get information and save it on the phone. Firefly can also recognize songs and television shows, or offer nutritional information for food.

Firefly是Fire Phone手機的主要特色之一。這是一項照片識別服務，既可以識別文本和圖像，也可以識別音頻及視頻。這項服務在手機的側面擁有專屬按鈕，可以掃描電話號碼、書籍甚至藝術作品，讓用戶得到相關信息並存儲在手機中。Firefly還能識別歌曲和電視劇，或提供食物的營養信息。

The phone also includes Mayday, a tech support feature that connects users via video stream to support staff.

手機還擁有一項Mayday服務，能夠提供技術支持，讓用戶與客服人員進行視頻通話。

In addition to teasing the release of its new product with vague hints at what was to come, Amazon has been touting the increased selection in its Amazon Appstore. Amazon said earlier this week that it has nearly tripled its apps selection in the past year, to 240,000, a number that signals impressive growth, but which is still about one-fifth of Apple’s app offerings. Amazon also reached a licensing deal with Blackberry on Wednesday to make all of its apps available on the latter’s new line of handheld devices set to launch this fall.

除了發佈新產品，讓人們對即將出現的手機有一定了解，亞馬遜還就其應用商店增加的品種進行了宣傳。亞馬遜在本週早些時候表示，在過去一年之中，亞馬遜商店的應用種類達到了之前的三倍，即24萬種。這樣的大幅進步令人印象深刻，不過它的應用數量仍然只有蘋果（Apple）應用商店的五分之一。亞馬遜在週三還與黑莓（Blackberry）達成了授權協議，讓所有應用都能夠在今年秋天發佈的一系列黑莓手持設備中得以使用。

One person who isn’t too excited about the partnership between Amazon and AT&T is T-Mobile CEO John Legere, who unleashed a Twitter rant against the new product a day before it was even announced. Legere came out against the exclusive partnership, tweeting that “Exclusivity sucks for customers,” while comparing the new Amazon device to the failed Facebook-HTC smartphone that flopped last year.

唯一對亞馬遜和美國電話電報公司的合作高興不起來的人是運營商T-Mobile公司的首席執行官約翰o萊傑爾。他在這款產品發佈的前一天就針對它發表了一條碎碎唸的Twitter消息。萊傑爾反對獨家合作，他在Twitter上說：“獨家合作對消費者而言糟糕透頂，”同時他還把亞馬遜的這款新產品比作Facebook與HTC去年合作推出、但卻遭遇慘敗的那款智能手機。