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Why Amazon Might Want a Big Piece of the Smartphone Market
Nerval's Lobster writes: If rumors prove correct, Amazon will unveil a smartphone at a high-profile June 18 event in Seattle. According to a new article in The New York Times, Amazon's willing to take such enormous risks because a smartphone will help it sell more products via its gargantuan online store. In theory, a mobile device would allow customers in the midst of their daily routines to order products with a few finger-taps, allowing Amazon to push back against Google and other tech companies exploring similar instant-gratification territory. But a smartphone also plays into Amazon's plans for the digital world. Over the past several years, the company has become a popular vendor of cloud services and used that base to expand into everything from tablets to a growing mobile-app ecosystem. A smartphone could prove a crucial portal for all those services. If an Amazon smartphone proves a hit, however, it could become a game-changer for mobile developers, opening up a whole new market for apps and services. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has succeeded in the digital space largely by opening up various platforms—whether Kindle self-publishing or the Amazon app store—to third-party wares. It'll be interesting to see whether he does something similar with the smartphone.
Early reports suggest Amazon's phone will be exclusive to AT&T.
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Anyone who wants to shop online at work will shop online at work with a bigger screen.
The amazon app while useful is a pain to use on a small screen.
Now if you combined amazon prime music and movies into the phone then it might make sense. however even then the use cases for watching movies and listen to music is quite small compared to the whole mobile phone market.
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... there is no subscriber cost other than Amazon Prime, at least for a basic smartphone plan. A lot of cheapskates have no particular allegiance to iOS/Android, and would be starry-eyed by such a deal.
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Of course Amazon wants a major piece of the mobile phone market. That's not news. What would be news is if they make a phone that plays nice outside of Amazon's ecosystem and isn't locked down like the rest of the kindle family of products.
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People can already use the Amazon app to buy stuff on their mobiles. So the Amazon phone is about more than that. Perhaps like Google they want to spy on you so they can advertise to you.
Or the alternative high end & hot? Will Late & Lame sell or will they give them away?
I can't help but seeing how a real alternative to the Google Play Store as being a bad thing. However, as someone who has used both stores, developers treat Amazon apps as less important, that's for sure. Many apps I use frequently are several versions behind on Amazon. I finally had to break down and use Google to get updates.
I think Amazon stuck a fork in the eye of Google when they pulled off a fork of Android. If they are going to really pull it off, though, Apps need to be kept up to date.
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I can easily see why amazon would like to add to it's monopoly.
The real question is can it offer ANY advantage to us for using it's hardware? If it can't, then they should give away an app, not try to sell us hardware.
For me, I can't think of anything they can do for me with hardware that they can't do with software.
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Why articles whose headlines start with the word "why" are nothing but clickbait opinion pieces and have no place on a news site.
I just purchased an 8-core THL w200s from Amazon for 200.00 bucks and Prime shipping. If they preloaded this phone with the Amazon App Store and marketed the hell out of it, they could sell the crap out of these phones for 200.00 bucks a pop. A similar American phone would sell in the 500.00 - 600.00 range.
And that is exactly how they could make a big splash in the Smartphone Market. A kick-butt phone in the 200.00 to sub-200.00 price range...
There is no way that being tied to AT&T will allow them to hit the $200 price point without a dreaded 2 year subscription (when the unsubsidized price hits $500-600) AT&T don't roll like that - that's what their off-brand MVNO is for (Go Phone, etc).
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Google's income stems from making advertisers believe they know what consumers want. As Amazon's catalog grows, it becomes a larger and larger center of what consumers don't just want, but actually shell out for. From a managerial perspective, I'm sure they could talk about saving money by combing their data centers. As a consumer, I'm not sure that I'd welcome such a merger.
If this phone from Amazon represents anything at all, it's that it's just one more nail in the coffin that Firefox OS is laying in.
Let's face it, Firefox OS is pretty much a dead-end project at this point. It is like a fetus just prior to being aborted; it was a mistake to begin with, it is unwanted as it is, and it would be very unwanted were it to survive. The humane thing should be done, and Firefox OS should be euthanized.
Even people living in third-world hellholes want and deserve better than what Firefox OS can give them. And that's exactly what they get when they buy second-hand Android and iOS devices from Europe, Asia, North America and Australia. And in a few years, they'll apparently also have Amazon phones to choose from, too.
It's odd - I'm not sure if a phone would drive more amazon services. What's their motivation? They already see what I buy, when, and in many cases for whom, but they don't really seem to use that information very effectively.
I see some targeted stuff, but not as much as I would expect given my ridiculously long shopping history. A phone would allow them to know more, but they don't seem to be using the data the have...so the extra data would be pointless.
They're not like google, in that their mobile is not a stalking horse for targeted ads. They're not really like Apple, since they don't really make high-end hardware. Launching a cellphone because you're feeling left out isn't really a great business case. Amazon doesn't really need to control the experience, since you can buy anything on amazon on other platforms.
Maybe they got a good deal on bulk minutes and cheap hardware, and want to pass the savings onto the public?
probably cheaper to buy blackberry than develop a phone from scratch, and blackberry's technology is quite impressive despite the pathologically incompetant CxO's steering as hard as possible towards the ground.
BB10 already supports android apps so making amazon app store apps run on it will be easy, then integrate tightly with amazons media services (kindle, cloud player, prime music, prime video, instant video rentals, MP3 store) and they will have hardware and media services rivaling apple's and beating google's
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And exclusively with AT&T?! Let me rush right out of here... and start shorting AMZN.
Why Amazon Might Want a Big Piece of the Smartphone Market?
isn't this sort of a dumb question? I think the real question is why they think they can ACHIEVE a big piece of the smartphone market.
Hell Research in Motion and Microsoft want a big piece of the smartphone market, but they aren't getting it. Facebook tried to get a piece of the smartphone market and that failed miserably. Why doesn't Amazon just work on their app and mobile website instead?
> probably cheaper to buy blackberry than develop a phone from scratch
If Blackberry can't market their own phones, how could a non-phone company like Amazon do so?
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Because they already have the same infrastructure plus the large physical goods market place that all the other big players possess. In my books Amazon is Google's only equivalent.
Next we should expect them to competitively price their devices below their competitors Samsung and Apple just like was done with the Kindle HD. Kindle cost half what other tablets did at the time of launch selling for $199 whereas competitors sold their tablets for $500.
In the smartphone realm device cost $220 to manufacture yet sell for $700 unlocked price. This gives Amazon room to adjust the price and features competitively. Perhaps selling the device fully loaded for $200 unlocked and making up for lost revenue through sales of Services and goods. I would rather pay $200 for a device then $700 for example as the market has shifted away from selling contract lines. Also under contract might see the phone sell for zilch or better even when just launched brand new.
Okay, news flash: Each corporation wants its own walled garden with DRM for delivering the "last mile" to consumers for the big-media copyright industry. Why would Amazon be different? They want to go to the copyright industry and license their content for distribution in their walled garden. Amazon is at a disadvantage without a small-screen phone form factor, since the Kindle is only a tablet.
Desk top computers, for non-business use, are the pianos of a garage band. They are huge, stationary, fully functional and easy to on the fingers. People are moving away from the desktop and using small devices to do business with Amazon which means that Amazon is not a point-topoint business model. I think it only reasonable that Amazon wants to tap into the entire business model. If they do it right, it'll be a big hit. If not, it's back to the drawing board.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
...it's going to be facebook phone 2.0...
While I make use of amazon quite a bit, I have zero interest in their forked/hacked up version of android devices...
I (and they) can do this already with Amazon PriceCheck and the normal Amazon app. Why bother making a whole cellphone just do reinvent the wheel?