Comment on Review: Amazon Fire offers new ways to use phones

NEW YORK (AP) — What I find fascinating about Amazon's Fire phone isn't the gizmos such as the 3-D imagery or the camera scanner that helps you get more information about products. The iPhone and its Android smartphone rivals are so much alike that companies have been suing each other for stealing ideas. Amazon may fix some of these issues by the time the phone ships Thursday, and other fixes will likely come through future software updates, but consider that it took Amazon's tablet computer two years to become a strong contender to Apple's iPad. The Fire has a 13-megapixel camera and a screen that measures 4.7 inches diagonally, a comfortable size for one-handed use. Using four infrared cameras, the phone gauges where your head is and redraws images on the screen continually so they appear 3-D. Once there's a match, you can swivel the phone to buy an item through Amazon, add a phone number to your contacts app or learn more about a movie through Amazon's IMDb. [...] after scanning the movie poster for "Stranger by the Lake," I could launch the Flixster app for more information, but I couldn't go directly to Netflix because that app hasn't enabled the feature yet. Apps for various Amazon services, such as e-books, audiobooks, music and video, have been designed to work with the carousel, so watching one movie will give you recommendations for others. More outside apps will need to take advantage of the innovations for the phone to be useful beyond people who already use Amazon services extensively.