Amazon making Firefly available on all Fire HD tablets

Last year one of the most buzzworthy stories of the tech world was the release of the Amazon Fire smartphone, the giant retailer’s first foray into the mobile phone market. The device, despite all the attention it received, never seemed to generate sufficient sales interest as revealed by the $83 million in inventory Amazon was holding at the end of the third quarter. In what may be a sign of cannibalization of the Fire smartphone, Amazon is making the Firefly software that came on the device available for all Fire HD tablets.

Firefly is Amazon’s answer to an app like Google Goggles, the plethora of QR code scanners, and music identification programs like Shazam. Firefly combines all of these so users could use their device to scan objects, books, movies, posters, QR codes and other items to get more information about them. Amazon included 245,000 movie and television episode titles in the library, 160 live TV channels, and 35 million songs. Users of the app did note that it had an unsurprising tendency to direct users to Amazon for potential purchases whenever they scanned an item if it was available from the retailer.

The Firefly app update is being pushed out as an OTA update to all Fire HD tablets, although the Fire HDX 8.9 tablet already had access to it.

The other big piece of software that Amazon included on the Fire smartphone was called Dynamic Perspective and created the 3D effects on the phone. Amazon may eventually decide to push that out as well as a way to make their line of tablets more attractive to buyers in the tablet market.

Come comment on this article: Amazon making Firefly available on all Fire HD tablets