Last week, Amazon turned heads with its announcement of the Fire TV set-top box, a relatively low-stakes play that generated both high levels of interest and mixed reviews. 'It's a set-top box, save your excitement for something bigger.'
Well...over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that everyone's favorite online marketplace will announce it's first flagship smart phone in June, 2014, as 'part of a braod push into hardware that would pit it against' Apple and Samsung. Them's fightin' words!
According to WSJ sources, developer demos have already begun, and the phone would come to market in September, likely setting it in direct competition with Samsung, Apple, Google, Huawei, HTC and others for holiday season sales. The report claims the phone 'hopes to distinguish' itself with 'a screen capable of displaying seemingly three dimensional images without special glasses' and 'retina-tracking technology embedded in four front-facing cameras...to make some images appear to be 3-D, similar to a hologram.'
In this writer's opinion, a few nifty hologram tricks won't be enough to make Amazon's first phone play a hit. Retina-tracking tech, one assumes, would be used to scroll or manipulate the screen using eye movements, which would be a major first in smartphone tech. But, as with most nascent technologies, it's yet unclear if such a system will work smoothly in a wide-release consumer product. In fact, evidence points to the contrary: HTC's EVO3D, which included a glasses-free 3D feature, and Samsung's Galaxy S4 both included eye tracking, yet only in certain apps and to ill effect. The trend hasn't been a hit, else more phones would be in on the action.
What is clear (though not included in the report), is that Amazon's business model is significantly different, at least on the surface, from its competitors. Rather than derive the majority of profit from the device sales, Amazon views the devices as access points to Amazon's web-based, but increasingly real-world, services, like Amazon Fresh.
But do consumers want what is basically a constant advertisement in their pocket? Commenters on C-Net (who are obviously not a random sample of American consumers, but still) point out Amazon's lack of third party app support on the current Fire tablet line (no Google Maps, for example), and bemoan the Amazon's sales motive; Combat_Wombat writes, 'Amazon's tablets are geared towards one thing: selling you Amazon stuff. People don't want their phone trying to get them to buy stuff from one firm all day.'
How pervasive is this sentiment? And will it change rapidly? Amazon is banking on the answer being yes. With Apple's app store dominating the (admittedly newer) Amazon app store five-to-one, and new, larger iPhone's on the way, it seems Amazon would be misguided in attempting to follow the same path. Perhaps the company is wise in using its hardware to increase use of its other services, like Instant Video (and its slate of new original 'TV' content). Apple set the model by building an immersive ecosystem of hardware and software that consumers both felt comfortable in and never had to leave. Amazon has and is growing the software half of that equation, and, though its hardware half has been relatively narrow in scope to date, the company is clearly ready to double down and step out of the url.
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