Updated: The top of the phone actually appears to be visible at around the 0:40 mark in the video, when the shot cuts to the lady in blue. The headphone jack is on the top — hooray! We’re not sure if this is the result of an awful video editing job, or an intentional teaser. Hopefully the latter, for the video editing guy’s sake.
Amazon has been rumored to be building its own smartphone since as far back as 2011. In 2012/2013, that rumor diverged into two phones: An inexpensive model, a bit like the Kindle Fire tablet, and an expensive model that would compete with the iPhones and Galaxies of the world. The phone being unveiled on June 18 is almost certainly the expensive model. There could still be a cheap phone in the offing — stack ‘em high sell ‘em cheap is Amazon’s modus operandi, after all — but we’ll have to wait and see.
The most recent leak, from April this year, pegs the Amazon phone as having four forward-facing cameras that track your face, and then pairs that data with a 3D display to create a glasses-free 3D interface. For more details on how glasses-free 3D works, read our explainer from 2012, when 3D TVs were all the rage at CES. We don’t know the exact approach that Amazon will be using, but it’s probably along the lines of a double-resolution screen with microlenses that project half the image to your left eye, and half to your eight. The data from the head-tracking cameras allows the phone to generate the correct imagery for each eye, creating a very realistic 3D effect. According to BGR, which published the most recent leaked photos, the cameras capture infrared light — presumably using an infrared LED that’s hidden on the front of the phone somewhere.
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