6 ms·

Amazon Preparing to Release Smartphone

52 points by dannynemer 12y ago

iscrewyou 12y ago
https://www.google.com/#q=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2FSB10001424052702303873604579495940522902678 https://www.google.com/#q=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fnews... Would they sell it at or close cost like most Amazon hardware? I don't see a lot of the customer using "amazon content (movies and music, which amazon is trying to bet heavy on)" on their tiered data plans. Or sell above cost and join the market of, oh so many, other handsets?
- pat2man 12y ago
  Well it would lock them into the Amazon ecosystem...
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  You can still access Amazon content on WiFi, and they could play some games with caching. Flash is sold at a premium (wasn't the iPhone like, $100 to go from 8GB to 16GB?) but not actually all that expensive. Google Music is a perfect example, actually. I allow it to stream music over 3G, but it still aggressively manages a local cache of music anywhere from 1-2GB, leveraging WiFi to save data. (It would use more if I didn't have a dinky 8GB device)
thinkagain22 12y ago
Grr. Stop upvoting stuff we can't read without jumping through hoops.
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  It's not much of a hoop - you search for the article headline on Google, and you can read it for free without sign-up.
  - svas 12y ago
    Here's the difference between urls: Posted: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303873604579495940522902678 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230387360... Google: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20140411-711057.html http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20140411-711057.html Why not post the google one and save us the collective time lost?
VikingCoder 12y ago
I wish instead they would get their Android-Kindle products certified by Google, so we could get the Google Play Store Apps on them, and that they would put Amazon Instant Watch and Music Store as Google Play Store Apps, so I could rent movies on my Android devices. But I'm not one of those marketing geniuses who loves to create walled gardens and captured verticals and synergized markets and all that...
- Zak 12y ago
  It seems to me that the goal of selling smartphones is no longer to profit from the sale of hardware, but to put your own services and content stores in front of the user. We've been seeing this in the PC industry for a couple decades now, with moderate push back from Microsoft.
  - debt 12y ago
    It seems this is where most hardware is headed. Companies just want to get people integrated into their ecosystems as quickly and easily as possible. They don't really care to make money off the hardware itself. Also, the cost of manufacturing many of these devices is practically negligible at this point.
- TillE 12y ago
  The Google Play Store is a nightmare for smaller developers. Unlike every other app platform I can think of (including Amazon's) which just send you nice tidy royalty payments, Google expects you to handle the sales tax for each and every customer, everywhere in the world. And yet virtually nobody talks about this. I'm quite certain that any developer without an accountant is either getting it wrong or ignoring it completely. This is the reason that if I release a game for Android, it will only be through Amazon.
  - jonny_eh 12y ago
    Or monetize it via ads.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
kbd 12y ago
After my experience with the first-gen Kindle Fire, I'm disinclined to ever buy hardware from Amazon again.
- mkr-hn 12y ago
  The latest Kindle Fire works perfectly for me. I even installed the Google Play apps I wanted through an APK downloader and sideloading.
- jquery 12y ago
  Agree. What a disappointment that was. I ditched it for an iPad and never looked back. The iPad was a revelation compared to the Kindle Fire.
- enscr 12y ago
  Their culture is different from Apple. They didn't get a perfect product first time. But their revisions have been awesome and the beat Apple on price. Combined with Amazon prime, it does offer some advantages on content.
dclowd9901 12y ago
Oh goodie, another fucking platform to market, design, develop and test for.
- jquery 12y ago
  This is why HTML5 will win in the end. In a few years all your apps will be web-views again. Proprietary, walled-garden standards don't scale horizontally across platforms.
  - webwielder 12y ago
    "Web apps are the future" is the new "This is the year of Linux on the desktop".
    - jvagner 12y ago
      You're so right.
      - alttab 12y ago
        If Apple and Google put half as much effort into mobile web browsing as they did in proprietary platform development, we'd be further by now. The fact that in today's "build software people want" world you need to do it three times, or at the very least in 3 different languages on the front-end is fucking crazy. Now, the HTML5 problem will solve the platform. Especially with local storage and high performance browser graphics! Boom shaka-laka. Coming soon hopefully. The problem after that is much more trivial - responsive layout. Can you really write an all purpose app that responds to desktop, and all shapes of mobile and tablet without having to think about each form factor individually?
        anon1385 12y ago
        >If Apple and Google put half as much effort into mobile web browsing as they did in proprietary platform development, we'd be further by now. I doubt it. More likely we would have a bunch of browsers that followed an even more divergent set of standards. Web standards are slow to improve because they involve getting a bunch of competing companies to agree to things, often things that are against their commercial interests. It's ridiculous for people to claim to support web standards but then complain about the slow pace. That is an inevitable part of the process of trying to get everybody in the world to agree on a single platform API that monopolises all user facing software. Native platforms move forwards more quickly because Google doesn't need to get permission from Apple and Mozilla and Microsoft before they add a new feature to Android. The web has to be a slow moving lowest-common-denominator type platform or it loses the only advantage it has, which is that it runs just about everywhere. If you want a platform that is fast moving, exciting, and cutting edge then you don't want web standards at all, because web standards are exactly the opposite of those things, by design.
transfire 12y ago
I have to admit I am very surprised Amazon hasn't bought out Canonical in order to inherit a large install base and build their own ecosystem.
- troymc 12y ago
  When you refer the the "large install base" associated with Canonical, I assume you mean Ubuntu on servers. Lots of people do run Ubuntu on AWS, but Amazon never needed to own Canonical to make that possible. The Kindle Fire OS is a fork of the Android Open Source Project, not Ubuntu or Ubuntu Touch.
- tgeek 12y ago
  AWS has Amazon Linux: https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/ https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/ Since its the default OS for Linux on AWS, it probably has a pretty large install base. More than most would probably assume.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  I thought they were a Redhat shop. In which case, far far too late to change course!
  - alttab 12y ago
    Maybe I'm showing ignorance, but what about Redhat makes it far too late to change course?
    - sliverstorm 12y ago
      The differences are not large, but your institutional knowledge, existing management scripts/tools, custom packages, and (presumed) working relationship with Redhat the company all contribute to making one wonder whether it is worth it to switch hundreds of thousands of servers (millions?) to another distro. You could, but at what cost for what gain? Why, upgrades are trouble enough.
philo23 12y ago
I'd really love for Amazon to make a phone that uses the same eink screen as the kindle paperwhite. Just a basic, no frills phone with a similar long lasting battery life to the paperwhite. No doubt if they are planning a smart phone though it'll be more similar to their Kindle Fire tablets which is fair enough, but hey I can dream..
- alttab 12y ago
  This is a brilliant idea.
- myth_drannon 12y ago
  like Yota phone , but simpler http://yotaphone.com/ http://yotaphone.com/
- vvvnnnnvvv 12y ago
  Yes! Battery life is a killer feature for me. I'd be willing to sacrifice a lot of functionality for something that was as hardy and needed as little recharging as my kindle.
- damon_c 12y ago
  This would be really nice. E ink with LTE and tethering would totally make me happy.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
p-pat-ni 12y ago
Currently many amazon user are tied to the ecosystem with one of the below components. Amazon phone means they will end up being tied to a lot more (if not all)- Amazon App Store - Apps; Amazon music - music; Amazon video - video; Cloud Drive - to backup photos and files; Amazon app/Flow app/amazon fresh - shopping/grocery; Kindle app - books; Amazon games(gamecircle) - gaming; I think the only missing component is 'messaging'. They don't have anything equivalent to google hangout or bbm or WhatsApp.
danford 12y ago
Sounds neat. Any word on what OS it's running?
- mkr-hn 12y ago
  Probably Fire OS.
rory096 12y ago
>They said the phone would employ retina-tracking technology embedded in four front-facing cameras, or sensors, to make some images appear to be 3-D, similar to a hologram, the people said. Reminds me of the zSpace. (https://zspace.com https://zspace.com) Pretty neat stuff.
rajacombinator 12y ago
Now all they need is a search engine ...
- alttab 12y ago
  Google.com's search engine gives you "information" and tries to sell stuff. Amazon.com's search engine finds you products when you're trying to buy stuff.
davidw 12y ago
Amazon is great for content, but not having the Google apps like gmail, maps, and so on is kind of a dealbreaker. Also, with a Nexus phone, Google keeps creating updates for it. I don't get the impression Amazon is so concerned with keeping things updated like that.
- taude 12y ago
  Agree about not having a full app ecosystem like Google apps, however, Amazon keeps their hardware up to date. I've had a couple Kindles of different vintage and they continue to have firmware updates for them.
- mkr-hn 12y ago
  My Kindle Fire gets regular system updates. The latest was a few days ago. I don't know what the updates involve aside from updates like Goodreads integration, but I do know it's not getting worse. It was already nearly perfect the day I got it. The only update I'd want is Google Play, and that's not a deal breaker since I can sideload the important stuff.
dalek2point3 12y ago
I'm wondering how come no one is talking about the elephant in the room. Google Services! No one really cares about Android's "open"-ness anyone, because without Goog services a smartphone is virtually nothing -- you need maps, youtube and gmail at the very least. AMZN has a plan for that?

52 points by dannynemer 12y ago

https://www.google.com/#q=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2FSB10001424052702303873604579495940522902678 https://www.google.com/#q=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fnews... Would they sell it at or close cost like most Amazon hardware? I don't see a lot of the customer using "amazon content (movies and music, which amazon is trying to bet heavy on)" on their tiered data plans. Or sell above cost and join the market of, oh so many, other handsets?

pat2man 12y ago
Well it would lock them into the Amazon ecosystem...
sliverstorm 12y ago
You can still access Amazon content on WiFi, and they could play some games with caching. Flash is sold at a premium (wasn't the iPhone like, $100 to go from 8GB to 16GB?) but not actually all that expensive. Google Music is a perfect example, actually. I allow it to stream music over 3G, but it still aggressively manages a local cache of music anywhere from 1-2GB, leveraging WiFi to save data. (It would use more if I didn't have a dinky 8GB device)

thinkagain22 12y ago

Grr. Stop upvoting stuff we can't read without jumping through hoops.

VikingCoder 12y ago
It's not much of a hoop - you search for the article headline on Google, and you can read it for free without sign-up.
- svas 12y ago
  Here's the difference between urls: Posted: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303873604579495940522902678 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230387360... Google: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20140411-711057.html http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20140411-711057.html Why not post the google one and save us the collective time lost?

VikingCoder 12y ago

I wish instead they would get their Android-Kindle products certified by Google, so we could get the Google Play Store Apps on them, and that they would put Amazon Instant Watch and Music Store as Google Play Store Apps, so I could rent movies on my Android devices. But I'm not one of those marketing geniuses who loves to create walled gardens and captured verticals and synergized markets and all that...

Zak 12y ago
It seems to me that the goal of selling smartphones is no longer to profit from the sale of hardware, but to put your own services and content stores in front of the user. We've been seeing this in the PC industry for a couple decades now, with moderate push back from Microsoft.
- debt 12y ago
  It seems this is where most hardware is headed. Companies just want to get people integrated into their ecosystems as quickly and easily as possible. They don't really care to make money off the hardware itself. Also, the cost of manufacturing many of these devices is practically negligible at this point.
TillE 12y ago
The Google Play Store is a nightmare for smaller developers. Unlike every other app platform I can think of (including Amazon's) which just send you nice tidy royalty payments, Google expects you to handle the sales tax for each and every customer, everywhere in the world. And yet virtually nobody talks about this. I'm quite certain that any developer without an accountant is either getting it wrong or ignoring it completely. This is the reason that if I release a game for Android, it will only be through Amazon.
- jonny_eh 12y ago
  Or monetize it via ads.
- sliverstorm 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

kbd 12y ago

After my experience with the first-gen Kindle Fire, I'm disinclined to ever buy hardware from Amazon again.

mkr-hn 12y ago
The latest Kindle Fire works perfectly for me. I even installed the Google Play apps I wanted through an APK downloader and sideloading.
jquery 12y ago
Agree. What a disappointment that was. I ditched it for an iPad and never looked back. The iPad was a revelation compared to the Kindle Fire.
enscr 12y ago
Their culture is different from Apple. They didn't get a perfect product first time. But their revisions have been awesome and the beat Apple on price. Combined with Amazon prime, it does offer some advantages on content.

dclowd9901 12y ago

Oh goodie, another fucking platform to market, design, develop and test for.

jquery 12y ago
This is why HTML5 will win in the end. In a few years all your apps will be web-views again. Proprietary, walled-garden standards don't scale horizontally across platforms.
- webwielder 12y ago
  "Web apps are the future" is the new "This is the year of Linux on the desktop".
  - jvagner 12y ago
    You're so right.
    - alttab 12y ago
      If Apple and Google put half as much effort into mobile web browsing as they did in proprietary platform development, we'd be further by now. The fact that in today's "build software people want" world you need to do it three times, or at the very least in 3 different languages on the front-end is fucking crazy. Now, the HTML5 problem will solve the platform. Especially with local storage and high performance browser graphics! Boom shaka-laka. Coming soon hopefully. The problem after that is much more trivial - responsive layout. Can you really write an all purpose app that responds to desktop, and all shapes of mobile and tablet without having to think about each form factor individually?
      - anon1385 12y ago
        >If Apple and Google put half as much effort into mobile web browsing as they did in proprietary platform development, we'd be further by now. I doubt it. More likely we would have a bunch of browsers that followed an even more divergent set of standards. Web standards are slow to improve because they involve getting a bunch of competing companies to agree to things, often things that are against their commercial interests. It's ridiculous for people to claim to support web standards but then complain about the slow pace. That is an inevitable part of the process of trying to get everybody in the world to agree on a single platform API that monopolises all user facing software. Native platforms move forwards more quickly because Google doesn't need to get permission from Apple and Mozilla and Microsoft before they add a new feature to Android. The web has to be a slow moving lowest-common-denominator type platform or it loses the only advantage it has, which is that it runs just about everywhere. If you want a platform that is fast moving, exciting, and cutting edge then you don't want web standards at all, because web standards are exactly the opposite of those things, by design.

transfire 12y ago

I have to admit I am very surprised Amazon hasn't bought out Canonical in order to inherit a large install base and build their own ecosystem.

troymc 12y ago
When you refer the the "large install base" associated with Canonical, I assume you mean Ubuntu on servers. Lots of people do run Ubuntu on AWS, but Amazon never needed to own Canonical to make that possible. The Kindle Fire OS is a fork of the Android Open Source Project, not Ubuntu or Ubuntu Touch.
tgeek 12y ago
AWS has Amazon Linux: https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/ https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/ Since its the default OS for Linux on AWS, it probably has a pretty large install base. More than most would probably assume.
sliverstorm 12y ago
I thought they were a Redhat shop. In which case, far far too late to change course!
- alttab 12y ago
  Maybe I'm showing ignorance, but what about Redhat makes it far too late to change course?
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    The differences are not large, but your institutional knowledge, existing management scripts/tools, custom packages, and (presumed) working relationship with Redhat the company all contribute to making one wonder whether it is worth it to switch hundreds of thousands of servers (millions?) to another distro. You could, but at what cost for what gain? Why, upgrades are trouble enough.

philo23 12y ago

I'd really love for Amazon to make a phone that uses the same eink screen as the kindle paperwhite. Just a basic, no frills phone with a similar long lasting battery life to the paperwhite. No doubt if they are planning a smart phone though it'll be more similar to their Kindle Fire tablets which is fair enough, but hey I can dream..

alttab 12y ago
This is a brilliant idea.
myth_drannon 12y ago
like Yota phone , but simpler http://yotaphone.com/ http://yotaphone.com/
vvvnnnnvvv 12y ago
Yes! Battery life is a killer feature for me. I'd be willing to sacrifice a lot of functionality for something that was as hardy and needed as little recharging as my kindle.
damon_c 12y ago
This would be really nice. E ink with LTE and tethering would totally make me happy.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

p-pat-ni 12y ago

Currently many amazon user are tied to the ecosystem with one of the below components. Amazon phone means they will end up being tied to a lot more (if not all)- Amazon App Store - Apps; Amazon music - music; Amazon video - video; Cloud Drive - to backup photos and files; Amazon app/Flow app/amazon fresh - shopping/grocery; Kindle app - books; Amazon games(gamecircle) - gaming; I think the only missing component is 'messaging'. They don't have anything equivalent to google hangout or bbm or WhatsApp.

danford 12y ago

Sounds neat. Any word on what OS it's running?

mkr-hn 12y ago
Probably Fire OS.

rory096 12y ago

>They said the phone would employ retina-tracking technology embedded in four front-facing cameras, or sensors, to make some images appear to be 3-D, similar to a hologram, the people said. Reminds me of the zSpace. (https://zspace.com https://zspace.com) Pretty neat stuff.

rajacombinator 12y ago

Now all they need is a search engine ...

alttab 12y ago
Google.com's search engine gives you "information" and tries to sell stuff. Amazon.com's search engine finds you products when you're trying to buy stuff.

davidw 12y ago

Amazon is great for content, but not having the Google apps like gmail, maps, and so on is kind of a dealbreaker. Also, with a Nexus phone, Google keeps creating updates for it. I don't get the impression Amazon is so concerned with keeping things updated like that.

taude 12y ago
Agree about not having a full app ecosystem like Google apps, however, Amazon keeps their hardware up to date. I've had a couple Kindles of different vintage and they continue to have firmware updates for them.
mkr-hn 12y ago
My Kindle Fire gets regular system updates. The latest was a few days ago. I don't know what the updates involve aside from updates like Goodreads integration, but I do know it's not getting worse. It was already nearly perfect the day I got it. The only update I'd want is Google Play, and that's not a deal breaker since I can sideload the important stuff.

dalek2point3 12y ago

I'm wondering how come no one is talking about the elephant in the room. Google Services! No one really cares about Android's "open"-ness anyone, because without Goog services a smartphone is virtually nothing -- you need maps, youtube and gmail at the very least. AMZN has a plan for that?