Amazon is currently developing a successor to the Fire Phone and it is codenamed as “Ice”, according to a report from the online publication Gadgets 360. The claims of a new smartphone from Amazon comes at around three years after the launch, and eventual demise, of the ill-fated Fire Phone. The report claims that Amazon’s Ice Phone will be released with select Google applications like Gmail and Google Play pre-installed into the device. This is in stark contrast to the Fire Phone which did not support these applications. By pre-installing Google applications, Amazon’s Ice Phone may be more appealing to consumers as they do not need to go through extra steps to install the Google software that they commonly use. Given that it is an Amazon device, it is quite surprising that the handset does not support Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa at this point. However, given that the device is still being developed and that Amazon’s Alexa is already available in at least one flagship handset, it is likely that the Ice Phone’s support for Alexa will be added at a future date.
The specifications of Amazon’s Ice Phone make it clear that it is a mid-range smartphone. The device will likely be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 435 chipset. The said chipset is composed of an octa-core ARM Cortex A53 CPU clocked at 1.4GHz with Adreno 505 GPU for the device’s graphics processing needs. The handset is expected to have 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. There is no clear word on the display size of the device but it is likely that the screen size of the retail version will be at least 5.2-inches and at most 5.5-inches. Meanwhile, the smartphone’s rear fingerprint scanner will make securing the device a bit easier. For the smartphone user’s imaging needs, the device will have a 13-megapixel rear camera but there are no available details yet regarding the specifications of the front-facing camera.
The report claims that Amazon’s Ice Phone will be available in India by the latter part of this year, with the device likely to be priced at around Rs.http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/06/05/deal-alert-buy-daydream-view-google-store-get-25-google-play-credit/ 6,000 ($93). There is no word yet whether this device will be available in the United States and other countries.