Amazon Once Again Rumored to be Working on a Smartphone
It'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 (960x540) 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.
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?
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.