Amazon takes aim at rival smartphones with Fire Phone

With the unveiling of its Fire Phone, a logical progression to the Kindle Fire and the Fire TV media streamer, Amazon is squarely targeting other companies' flagship smartphones PC.com reported.

Samsung's own flagship, the Galaxy S5, which retails at $99.99 at Amazon, leads the smartphone pack for most carriers, but here is how they compare:

• Though both are Android phones, Samsung comes with several bells and whistles, unique hardware aspects to a fairly standard version of Android 4.4.2 KitKat, while the Fire Phone comes with Amazon's highly-modified version of Android, Fire OS.
• At first view, Fire OS 3.5's big, friendly tiles and icons seem to be closer to iOS than Android, which is appropriate considering how much the Fire Phone has in common with the iPhone 5s.
• With the launch of the Fire Phone, Amazon can challenge Apple as the leader in digital music sales, say analysts.

According to Amazon's head of digital music who spoke to VentureBeat last week, the company was ''expanding the pie'' for music overall and attempting to make Amazon a company people associated with music just as much as they did with books.

Amazon's streaming service, Prime Music, has much similarity with Spotify, Beats, and Rdio in the sense that one could pull music from the cloud on-demand.

Further, since Prime Music's library of freely available tracks was much less than that of competitors, its overall library was not. One could still purchase plenty of tracks, but to really sell this service, and by default Amazon as a place one went for music, one needed a branded smartphone.

A further incentive was that when one bought the smartphone, one got a free year's subscription to Amazon Prime, which included the music service.

According to commentators, one of the biggest draws of the Fire Phone for Amazon was that it had improved the capability to tag objects one might buy while out in the real world.