On Wednesday, at a much-anticipated event in Seattle, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the "Fire Phone," surprising no one, after a series of leaks and teasers all but gave away the existence of the online retail giant's new device. 

Amazon's Fire Phone doubles down on the "Fire" brand name, now applied to its Kindle tablets, set-top TV boxes, and, now, the company's smartphone. It comes with pretty standard specs, Amazon-specific services, and one feature that's completely new.

Specs: Like Most Other Smartphones

The Fire Phone comes with a 4.7-inch HD display with dual-sided Gorilla Glass 3, a quad core Qualcomm 2.2 GHz processor with an Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB of RAM, and a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera with optical image stabilization with an f/2.0 lens. The Fire Phone comes in a 32GB internal storage model and a 64GB model.

Bezos, at the live event (via The Verge and Mashable's live blogs), touted that the display gets better outdoor viewing than competitors because of its dynamic image contrast, and, because of the optical image stabilization and large aperture (similar to the HTC One) the Fire Phone captures photos with less digital noise than an iPhone 5s and less blur than the Samsung Galaxy S5.

As an added bonus, there's a physical shutter button on the side of the phone (a feature much lacking in modern smartphones) and, with Amazon's cloud services, unlimited photo storage for free.

New Features: 3D Screen and New Gesture Control

Of course, the most anticipated feature of the Fire Phone is the 3D screen effect, which Bezos unveiled with the label "Dynamic Perspective." As opposed to Apple's "pop out at you parallax," as Bezos called it, the 3D screen on the Amazon Fire Phone is more of an inward depth effect, making lockscreens and 3D images of buildings on maps appear more layered and detailed. Games look pretty great with the 3D perspective as well.

Bezos went into detail about the years Amazon spent developing the Fire Phone's technology, which included a lot of trial and error and awkward early attempts, before the company arrived at the solution: four cameras in each corner with a 120-degree field of view and infrared capabilities that constantly know where the user's head is, no matter what ambient lighting or facial hair poses a challenge. Amazon also (admittedly, even for Bezos) creepily trained the Dynamic Perspective software to recognize faces and heads by using millions of images of thousands of faces, over the course of several years.

Besides the 3D perspective, the Fire Phone also takes advantage of tilt and flick gestures, in tandem with the 3D screen, to navigate through screens and products (of course, for example, on Amazon.com) or to play certain tilt-control games.

The tilt effect also can be used to scroll through webpages and text. At first blush, the tilting seems more like one of those UI gimmicks that have been tried before, like with Samsung Galaxy S4's useless eye-tracking "smart scroll," but with the addition of the 3D depth effect, Amazon might just pull it off. We'll have to wait until a hands-on review to find out, but if the no-finger tilt scroll is fine-tuned and not out-of-control, it could be a brand new, easier, way to navigate through your phone one-handed.

Fire Phone's Biggest Asset: Amazon's Ecosystem

The biggest advantage of an Amazon smartphone -- just like with Apple -- is the company's ecosystem and services that come free with the device. And Amazon is not skimping on bonus services. For starters, the Fire Phone comes with a free year of Prime (now worth $99). For Prime members, Amazon will extend the membership another year for free.

Amazon will also provide the same 24/7 live, instantly-reachable, Mayday tech support and concierge service that it premiered with the Kindle Fire HDX, which, on the phone, will be available both on Wi-Fi and through 3G/4G connections.

Another ecosystem feature is Amazon's cloud, which, as previously mentioned, will allow any Fire Phone owner to store unlimited photos. But Amazon's cloud also comes baked into the Fire Phone's everyday operations, evidenced by the fact that the smartphone's app carousel has a tab for the phone and also one for the cloud. Of course, the Fire Phone will be able to fling content right up to the Fire TV, and will come with Amazon Prime services like Prime Music, Video, and Kindle content.

Finally, there's Firefly, a new service for the Fire Phone that has its own physical button and will (Amazon hopes) encourage identification and online purchasing of physical products, music, television shows, and movies. Firefly uses the phone's camera to recognize up to 100 million different items just by holding the camera's shutter button. Bezos demonstrated the system with a jar of Nutella, and almost instantaneously, the phone brought up information and, of course, the option to buy it on Amazon.

It also works like Shazam, identifying TV shows and music, which itself isn't anything new, but put together with the physical product scanning ability that makes for a powerful quick-buy product for everything Amazon can sell you. But it's not just about selling more Amazon products and media, because Firefly can recognize signs, phone numbers, and business cards while filtering out unnecessary image details and keeping the file size of the images low.

And Amazon opened up a software developers kit (SDK) for third-party developers to create apps for the Firefly system and for Dynamic Perspective.

Release Date and Price: AT&T Exclusive

Unfortunately for those using three of the four most popular wireless carriers, Amazon's Fire Phone is indeed an AT&T exclusive, as was rumored. It comes on a two-year contract, with the 32GB model at $199.99 and the 64GB model at $299.99. The non-contract price, from Amazon, is a hefty $649.

The Fire Phone is available for Pre-Order on Amazon and AT&T on Wednesday, and will be released on July 25.

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