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Amazon Reportedly Plans Smartphone
AlistairCharlton writes "Online retailer Amazon is developing its own smartphone to take on the Apple iPhone and handsets that run the Google Android operating system, according to media reports 'Foxconn International Holdings Ltd. (2038), the Chinese mobile- phone maker, is working with Amazon on the device, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. Amazon is seeking to complement the smartphone strategy by acquiring patents that cover wireless technology and would help it defend against allegations of infringement, other people with knowledge of the matter said.'"
...acquiring patents that cover wireless technology and would help it defend against allegations of infringement...
Yeah. Innovation. That's what patents drive.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Oh wait. I already said that...
It's going to be a great smartphone, it will be very smart, every pixel on it will be personally supervised by Bezos and you'll be able to use the smartphone for everything!
You can browse Amazon with it.
You can email to Amazon with it.
You can buy from Amazon with it.
You can sell on Amazon with it.
You can Amazon the Amazon with it.
It's so great, that they will put Amazon into Amazon because they heard that you like to Amazon while you Amazon.
You can't handle the truth.
But id love to get one....What am i waiting for?
Im not waiting for an Amazon branded smartphone.
Im not waiting for some specific killer app.
Im not waiting for iphone 7.0 or whatever number theyre up to.
Im waiting for an unlimited plan that is closer to $50 a month than it is to $100.
Yea i know... it'll probably never happen.
So i'll probably never have a smart phone... no matter who puts their name on them.
Everyone's worried by apple and google and microsoft, but do you notice Foxconn is manufacturing them all? :)
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
They are going to patent 'One-Click Dialling'!!!
I guess I'll hold judgement until I see an announcement, but a mini Kindle Fire springs to mind. IMO (price aside) the Kindle Fire is the worst of all worlds in the mobile space - laggy and locked down. It's everything I don't want in my next phone. On the bright side, it'll probably be cheap.
- chrish
Amazon Plans Smartphone to Rival Apple iPhone and Google Android Devices
So if it's competing against Android, is it running Android? Or is it running some other OS that Amazon put together?
Finding God in a Dog
Maybe they will embed within the phone the power of the Kindle with the Search Engine of Bing....
Then they could call the product "Kindle-ing" and so it would finally live up to its name!!!
I'm less impressed with new phones entering the market. There's a ton of smart phones and everyone can find something they like.
Where we do need more competition is decent service providers. There's a handful of majors (I won't even go into the pay as you go crap vendors). The majors like Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, etc... have all settled into a pricing structure where they barely compete. There's no dynamic at work driving the price of service down. If anything, they occasionally increase their prices. I'd like to see someone with the financial means to compete enter the arena and change the game.
We have the iPhone and we have Android. Unless Amazon intends to develop it's own OS, then their phone is just going to be another Android phone. Oh joy... because it's not like there are any Android phones on the market that allow browsing and shopping with Amazon, are there?
Seems to me that their interests would be better served by developing apps that run on existing phones that work better than the ones they have out there right now.
Apple copied the Kindle and its content-to-device-locking (and named it iPad), so now Amazon can copy the iPhone.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Should be the top comment on this article
At the end on my contract I decided to go with an MVNO briefly last year. Cox Communications purchased some bandwidth off Sprint and offered a decent pricing bundle for people who already had their cable and high speed internet.
Cox talked a good game, but they weren't organized. They had difficulties porting my existing phone number. They didn't have a decent selection of phones (I had a HTC Wildfire. A true POS if there ever was one). Their Customer Service people seemed under-trained on the phone. They made BIG mistakes in my billing each month, so I was always calling to get crap corrected. I had to watch the wireless portion of my bill like a hawk.
And Cox failed. They deserved to.
I signed up for service with Cox Wireless last May and they pulled the plug ~6 months later. There was an internal memo that leaked saying they couldn't compete with 4G vendors, they were unable to buy the most popular phones, and the market changed faster than they could adapt. I received a letter in Nov. 2011 telling me they were freeing me from my contract. I could keep my phone (which I sold) and they gave me some money since they were the party breaking the contract.
I expect the current wave of Mobile Virtual providers will be a hodge-podge of the same experience for many people. Here today and gone tomorrow.
Like I said, I'd like to see a serious player get in the game and drive prices down.
"Smartphone, smartphone smart phone. Smartphonesmartphone?"
"Smartphone smartphone smartphone."
"Smartphone, smartphone! Smartphone..."
"SMARTPHONE!"
Well, how about this:
Apple is draconian, and makes it tough for Amazon (or anyone else) to compete.
Android is not really owned by Google, it also includes the carriers (Verizon, ATT etc) and the handset makers (Samsung etc) NONE of which upgrades your OS for you except for the Nexus line, and have incompatible SDKs, creating problems for developers (even w/ .apk files)
Amazon has a great IT backbone and is likely to avoid the Android problems above, and present a unified developer experience.
I dunno, but it seems like it could be a winner.
the patent owners have to agree to license them to you at the same rates which they license to everyone else which are pennies per handset.
you're wrong. if you don't have any IP, the licenses are definitely not pennies per handset.
"For 3G, if you have no IP of your own to bargain with, if you're at the bottom of the value chain you're looking at 25% royalties which can come down to 7% if you have IP; 10 or 15% is standard," says Michael Morgan. To make phones that use the GSM standard for calls, you have to join the GSM Alliance and pay their fees; Qualcomm has its own fee for the US CDMA standard.
source: http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/whos-making-money-from-your-smartphone-992247
Who will come out with a branded smart-phone next -- Walmart? JC Penney?
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
For the record, Foxconn isn't Chinese, its Taiwanese.
I make hardware RNGs, which give 2.5849625 bits of entropy per use in theory (actual performance dependent on usage).