Oldbeards will remember when Amazon failed to set the world on fire with its Fire Phone in 2014. A commercial flop unlike anything else Amazon had ever seen before, the Fire Phone ended up costing Amazon $170 million in unsold stock, and left such a scar on Amazon’s consciousness, that it didn’t attempt a similar device for over a decade.
But that period of hurt is coming to an end, as Amazon is reportedly working on a new Amazon-branded phone.
This news has come to light thanks to a report from Reuters, which spoke to four people “familiar with the matter”. According to the write-up, this new project is known internally as “Transformer”, and will — surprise, surprise — have Amazon’s services and shopping embedded as core features within the phone. Particular emphasis will be made on making the phone sync up with your Amazon shopping history, and it will also be tuned to work well with Prime Video streaming, Prime Music, or from Amazon partners like Grubhub.
That’s to be expected from an Amazon phone, of course, but there’s another angle here that’s all-too-predictable — AI.
The world’s most tiresome buzzword will also be integrated deep within the Transformer, to the point where insiders hinted that it could remove the need for an app store with separate apps.
Quite how that’s supposed to work isn’t answered, but then, details are fairly thin on the ground here. There’s no mention of a possible release date, a price range, or even whether it would be a traditional smartphone, or something more akin to a dumbphone.
In fact, the article even goes as far as to state that the project is quite fragile, and that any strategic shifts or financial concerns could cancel the project altogether. So it’s a good job Amazon isn’t pumping money into an obvious bubble, then.
The past looms large over this project. The Fire Phone was a massive flop, largely due to the proprietary operating system that lacked the same broad app support as iOS and Android at the time. Asking people to swap over to an entirely new OS that didn’t have all the same apps users were used to was a hard sell, even with Amazon behind it. Amazon is likely hoping that AI will be able to hurdle that obstacle, but quite how it does that remains to be seen.
If there’s a lot of juice in this particular orange, then I’m sure we’ll see more about this Amazon Transformer in the next few years. However, don’t be surprised if we learn in a decade that it got quietly canceled.
