New rumors have surfaced that suggest Amazon is working on three new smartphones with the assistance of HTC.
According to the Financial Times article that started all of this, there are three devices under construction with one already close to completion. Not much is known about any of these handsets, except that one will potentially sport a shiny new 3D UI.
This isn’t the first time it’s been suggesting that Amazon is making smartphones, but the stories about Amazon in 2013 are definitely a bit more fantastical.
3D user interface
The Amazon 3D UI wouldn’t rely on a parallax barrier like the Nintendo 3DS or other ‘traditional’ 3D screens. Instead, it would be more like iOS 7’s confusingly-titled parallax wallpapers, which in no way implement parallaxing but instead move the background around relative to the angle of the screen to create the illusion of depth.
The Amazon 3D UI would take this further. Four cameras around the front of the device would track face position relative to the screen and adjust the display accordingly. As such the user would see a 3D image, but any on-looker’s view would be distorted.
It’s a cool thought and we’d love to see it, even though it would probably prove pretty gimmicky. It does sound like the kind of rumor that’s started by a pet project run by in-house engineers who just want to see if they can do it. We doubt it’ll be a commercial product and it’s almost certainly not going to be featured in any up-coming phones. At least not in a major capacity.
Can Amazon enter the phone race this late?
Certainly. Amazon has the market presence, the apps, the cloud service, the developer relationships and the hardware experience with its Kindle Fire tablet line to take on the smartphone market. We think that it’s much more likely to succeed if it starts things off on Android, rather than following last year’s rumor that suggested it was working on its own native OS.
If there’s any company around right now that would have the best chance at making an entrance to the smartphone market it would be Amazon. Coupled with the expertise of HTC, which is also rumored to be considering selling up, there is a good recipe for market potential.
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