Advertisement

Tilting Amazon's phone could be the most important thing you do with it

Amazon's got at least one smartphone up its sleeves, and we know it's going to feature some curious 3D effects thanks to a slew of sensors and a quartet of front-facing cameras. That's not all she wrote, though: previous reports alleged that users could tilt their Amazon phones to and fro to interact with apps, and BGR claims to have more dirt on how that feature works. If true, tilting an Amazon phone could be one of most important things you could do to it.

Let's say you want to festoon a text message with a saved photo -- you'll need only tilt the phone to the side to open up the camera roll. Tilting in Amazon's video store will apparently cause IMDB ratings info to appear atop movie images, while performing the same action in the Kindle app (because of course it'd be included) brings up the X-Ray menu for more in-depth information about the book being read, too. That tilting already seems like a crucial component of Amazon's phone experience (well, this particular Amazon phone, anyway) but here's the big question -- is the company going to coax other app developers into baking tilt support into their software as well? BGR says yes, and that at least a few third-party apps will play nice when you start swinging your phone around. Hopefully they're good ones.

On some level, it seems like Amazon is just cramming gimmick after gimmick into this phone in hopes that it'll crack a jaded market. The company is reportedly going to pull back the curtain on this thing in just a few weeks, so it shouldn't be long before we see the extent of Amazon's vision... for better or worse.