Reports saying Amazon will be launching a Kindle smartphone have been going around the web for a while now, with no concrete evidence apart from the “unnamed industry sources” occasionally popping up.
Amazon has denied any Kindle phone in production and some find the phone would be lacklustre compared to the many Android variants out there, not offering any incredible mobile apps.
The Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD have both sold well, but we question how well the e-commerce giant will do in the smartphone market. The Kindle Fire was the first tablet to come with a budget price, pretty good specs and a seven-inch form factor, which was why it claimed 15% of Apple’s tablet market.
According to DigiTimes, the not so reliable source who has continuously reported about the Kindle smartphone, Amazon has just added a larger form factor to the smartphone, due to “phablet fever”.
The Kindle smartphone originally had a 4.3-inch display, but Amazon has pumped that up to a  4.7-inch display, to coincide with the many Android variants at similar screen sizes.
Amazon is also working on “enhancing other specifications of the smartphone,†and according to another report from DigiTimes, they may have feel into manufacturing problems.
Seems a little strange the company would be in the manufacturing stage of the smartphone, and yet change their screen size. Either they are bringing two versions of the Kindle phone to market, or the manufacturing blip was a false report.
We expect the Kindle smartphone to come with a very different version of Android under-the-hood. We also believe Amazon will sell the phone at a budget price, somewhere along the lines of the Nexus 4.
Still, we struggle to believe Amazon will come to market with a smartphone any time soon. Tablets are unique because they offer better ways to view certain types of content, but with smartphones, content like video, books and news is not used as much.
Amazon run on the basis that their phones will be sold at a lost and the content revenue will make up for it. With a smartphone, it will be harder to pull off, especially considering they will be borrowing content from the Android Play Store for most of their revenue.
