Android World: Android and Me

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Android and Me

WSJ: Amazon testing a smartphone with 4-5″ screen

Posted: 11 Jul 2012 07:39 AM PDT

It turns out that Amazon’s multiple device strategy may finally be coming to fruition.

We reported way back in early 2011 that Amazon was bringing a family of devices to market, with a phone and two tablets rumored to be somewhere in the testing process. While the timing may have been a bit off, we now have a 7″ Kindle Fire released to the public, a rumored 10″ Kindle Fire 2 coming as soon as the end of this month, and the Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning that Amazon is currently internally testing a smartphone with a screen between 4 and 5″. The WSJ report follows a Bloomberg report from last week that Amazon was working on a smartphone, and the two separate reports lend credibility to the Amazon phone rumor.

If the news holds, Amazon will begin production of the KindlePhone later this year or early next year, with the device going on sale sometime in early 2013. There are obviously more questions than answers at this point in the game, but one question we’d like to hear the answer to sooner than later is whether or not the KindlePhone will feature the Kindle UI Amazon’s placed on its Kindle Fire tablets.

This would further hook customers into the Amazon ecosystem at the expense of the Google Play Store, something Google likely isn’t too keen about. Google has released the Nexus 7 tablet with deep Google Play integration. Google hopes the Nexus 7 will pull customers away from the Kindle Fire tablet and get them deeply embedded into Google’s ecosystem, which is where big G obviously makes their money.

We’ll likely be hearing much more about an Amazon KindlePhone soon, and we’ll bring you the goods as soon as we learn ‘em.