Amazon has not hung its boots on Fire Phone yet. Fire Phone got a meaty update on Friday which brings along a host of functions which will endear it to its users.
The latest update adds to the Firefly feature and now it could recognize more than 2000 paintings. It will use the information available on Wikipedia to do this. Text translations have been enhanced and are now available for English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
A new addition is the best shot option which takes pictures just before and after you press the shutter. So users will now have three options to choose from.
The update also boasts a number of new fixes and this includes improved battery life, option to add custom ringtones and option to block phone numbers. Users can also choose and download dozens of keyboard languages.
Despite the reported failure of Fire Phone (just 1% of the U.S. market share), Amazon is reported to be working feverishly to release the next iteration of Fire Phone some time in 2016. According to an anonymous source, Amazon has shelved a phone it had been working on for months and gone back to the drawing board stage.
It is an apparent case of once bitten and twice shy. Amazon has burnt its fingers with the launch of its Fire Phone and this has been accepted by none other than Amazon Senior Vice President of Devices David Limp who told Fortune in October, “We didn’t get the price right. I think people come to expect a great value, and we sort of mismatched expectations. We thought we had it right. But we’re also willing to say, ‘we missed.’ And so we corrected.”
It could be Amazon’s second and only chance to become a major player in the smartphone market. It will be facing stiff competition from its Android, iOS and Windows Phone based rivals.
