Smartphones are a dime a dozen, particularly on the Android front. Many shapes, sizes, hardware, functionality, manufacturers, and so on. The market is hot right now and will continue to be so it’s no surprise that Amazon is interested in developing their own smartphone. While there have been many reports that the e-commerce company has been working on one, they’ll have a device out this fall, according to The Wall Street Journal, the chances of them launching a smartphone before the holidays is unlikely.
There’s a good reason for this which we’ll get into in a moment. Right now, the company is said to be looking at devices between 4 and 5 inches which tend to be the sweet spot for Android devices. Amazon’s smartphone will be more of a budget offering claims the report and will be manufactured by known other than Foxconn who also creates devices for Apple and many other tech companies.
Now, as to the delay. Production won’t begin till late this year or early next year which is possibly due to the fact that Amazon still has a lot of work to do, and timing issues with the manufacturing. Can Amazon have a successful smartphone? Only time can tell. The reality is that the smartphone market is over saturated with tons of devices, many great and many on the lower end. To compete will be incredibly difficult.
What Amazon needs to figure out and get right is how their phone will be different. They could really disrupt the market however by offering it completely unlocked for $299 or less, long as it has decent specs such as a dual-core processor, HD display, and 1GB RAM, not to mention 4G LTE. Either way, if they want to gain market share, they’ll have to take a loss, just like what they did with the Kindle Fire.