Amazon's Fire Phone offers screencasting, X-Ray, & the capability to predict the future

With digital media being one of Amazon’s main priorities, it’s no wonder the company has taken great care to make sure the newly debuted Fire Phone is packed with plenty of features for music and movie fans.

The Fire Phone adds a new screencasting feature that works in conjunction with the Fire TV set-top box. Basically, that means if you’re watching something on your phone, you can click a button to “flick” it to your TV screen. The feature already has support for Netflix, HBO Go, ESPN, and Hulu Plus, too. This is a move that several others — namely Google with its Chromecast and the Apple TV’s AirPlay — have been doing for a while, but it’s nice to see it represented on this new device.

And like you can already do with the Kindle Fire tablets, Amazon has built-in an “X-Ray” feature that gives you lots of background information about the TV show or movie you’re watching. Again, not something that’s entirely new, but definitely something that needed to be in Amazon’s first smartphone offering.

One thing that I was pretty impressed with is the ASAP feature, which basically predicts the video you’re about to watch and automatically loads it in the background. (It uses data about your media consumption behavior collected by Amazon.) ASAP means you’ll (hopefully) have a very short — if any — wait time the next time you only have five minutes to kill.