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Amazon Once Again Rumored to be Working on a Smartphone

AmazonBlaze_front1It’s been some 5 months since we last heard about Amazon’s rumored smartphone (here, here) and today it looks like this is a rumor which can’t die.

According to a Taiwanese tech industry blog, Amazon has signed a deal with Foxconn to start producing the phone.  We don’t have any details beyond the rumored contract, but unnamed sources are speculating that Amazon could sell 5 million units next year.

The rumor is coming from component manufacturers, though of course none of the sources were named. But they did also include/invent details like a rumored price tag of $100 to $200 with a launch scheduled for some time in the middle half of the year.

So Amazon has a smartphone (again). In spite of my disbelieving tone, I tend to believe this rumor is true.  The last time a similar rumor came around, first Bloomberg and then the WSJ reported that Amazon was thinking about a smartphone. That’s a pretty solid set of corroborating rumormongers.

And if they’re right then so could the earliest rumor, the one which said that this smartphone would have a 4.3″ screen with qHD resolution (960×540) and be running a highly specialized version of Android on a 1GHz dual core CPU.

TBH, by next summer those supposed specs would make this smartphone more than a little dated, so I’m not sure they’re reliable.

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Comments


Isles December 17, 2012 um 11:37 am

Do you think this phone would be successful? What would make a cellphone tied into Amazon’s ecosystem enticing enough to move buyers away from stock Android phones?

Nate Hoffelder December 17, 2012 um 12:07 pm

It depends on your definition of successful. Amazon will likely subsidize the price and tie it into their content stores, so there will be some appeal.

I don’t know enough about the smartphone market to predict how many Amazon will sell, but I expect they will be somewhere in the middle ranks in terms of sales.


e-book-news.de » Reader, Tablet, Smartphone: Plant Amazon für 2013 das Kindle-Phone? December 18, 2012 um 6:59 am

[…] Berichte gab es zuletzt Mitte des Jahres. Doch selbst ein Branchen-Insider wie Nate Hoffelder (The Digital Reader) meint inzwischen: „I tend to believe this rumor is true“. Tatsächlich haben auch bereits […]


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