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Thursday, November 17, 2011

Tech Here Comes an Amazon Smartphone?

Posted by Paul Constant on Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 3:34 PM

TechCrunch, which is the site that broke the news about Amazon's tablet, seems to think another gadget is in the works:

Amazon just entered the tablet market this week with its Kindle Fire. But this time next year, it could be introducing its own smartphone. A research report put out this morning by Citi analysts Mark Mahaney and Kevin Chang states that an “Amazon smartphone may be coming next year.”

Based on supply-chain checks with hardware manufacturers in China, Citi believes that Amazon is jointly developing the smartphone with Foxconn, but that the phone itself will be manufactured by TMS (which produces the Kindle line).

This raises a lot of questions—would Amazon be using their own forked version of Android as a phone operating system? Would this still be a Kindle product, as in a media consumption device that also happens to make phone calls? With regard to Foxconn, did Jeff Bezos ever see Mike Daisey's most recent show?—but I'm sure there'll be no lack of speculation about this device in the year to come. It seems entirely plausible to me.

Comments (7) RSS

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I'm not sure you can call their version of Android forked just yet. I'm not aware of any API's that they've added or any API's they've taken away. What they've done to android is closer to what HTC has done with sense.

I think Amazon ran into the problem that they wanted to make a tablet, and Google had not released the code for Honeycomb yet. That forced Amazon to go with the latest open sourced version as their base (Gingerbread).

We won't know for sure that they are intending to fork things until we see their second version. If their second version stays based of Gingerbread, they add a bunch of new API's, or they don't support all the new API's Google added in 3.x and 4.x; then we can call it forked. I'm not sure that's a good move on their part though. The upside to their tablet now is that it can run all of the Android apps that target 2.3 or earlier. With 4.x unifying the OS on phones and tablets; you're going to see more developers target that version. If they have to do a lot of extra work to support Amazon, they're not going to do. Especially if Amazon doesn't release any developer tools.

My guess is that we eventually see the Kindle Fire skin running on top of Ice Cream Sandwich, and Amazon working hard to prevent their system becoming a complete fork.

Posted by arbeck

on November 17, 2011 at 3:50 PM

here's my ghetto API implementation

if ("Amazon".equals(topic){
thow new Exception;
}

Posted by Dudeilicous on November 17, 2011 at 4:26 PM

Meanwhile, I'll be rocking my 50 core Teraflop iPad4 while you limp along on that piece of ... ;->~

Posted by Will in Seattle

on November 17, 2011 at 5:34 PM

@2 use --debug or "throw".

Posted by Will in Seattle

on November 17, 2011 at 5:35 PM

does the history of TechCrunch's accuracy matter when they're just reposting a report from Citi analysts?

Posted by Dr. Moriarty on November 17, 2011 at 6:16 PM

I want an e.ink smart phone, with a flip clamshell keypad and a battery that lasts a week...like my $79 reader Kindle.

Posted by Supreme Ruler Of The Universe

on November 17, 2011 at 11:06 PM

@Supreme Ruler

Motorola made one that is close. It's a candy bar and not a clamshell. You can still find them around if you look.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_FO…

Posted by arbeck

on November 18, 2011 at 8:28 AM