Amazon ‘ Fire’ chips from Samsung

Amazon. com Inc’s new “Fire” smartphone contains chips from Qualcomm Inc, NXP Semiconductors NV, and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, according to repair and teardown specialists iFixit, which pried one open on Thursday.

The Fire phone also houses chips from Synaptics Inc and Skyworks Solutions Inc, said the repair outfit, which made a name for itself taking apart devices like Apple Inc’s iPhone and identifying its internal components.

Amazon’s maiden smartphone, which includes four cameras that track a user’s head movements to enable special screen effects, ships this week to customers in the United States and is powered by a Qualcomm quad- core Snapdragon 800 processor.

The $ 600- plus device thrusts Amazon into a fiercely competitive smartphone market dominated by Apple and devices running Google Inc’s Android software.

It also feeds into Amazon’s core retail business. It touts a “Firefly” feature that can recognise objects and direct users to the same item on Amazon’s online store.

Dismantling a justdelivered Fire handset, iFixit said on its blog on Thursday that it discovered radio frequency, power amplifier, audio and wi- fi chips also from US Qualcomm.

Apart from the quartet of head- tracking cameras, the phone also includes a 13- megapixel rear- facing camera and a 2.1- megapixel front- facing camera.

The device opened by iFixit included 32 gigabytes of NAND memory chips made by Samsung for storing pictures, music and other media. The phone, which has a 4.7 inch LCD display, included 2 gigabytes of DRAM memory from Samsung.

chipmaker