Amazon Preparing to Release Smartphone | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Preparing to Release Smartphone

online.wsj.com

52 pointsdannynemer45 comments

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...

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.

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.

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.

Or monetize it via ads.

Still, Amazon Instant Video seems like a no-brainer. Get that on Google Play, stat! Please...

Are you sure about this? My reading of this document is that they do collect and process taxes in most jurisdictions:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

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..

like Yota phone , but simpler

http://yotaphone.com/

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.

This would be really nice. E ink with LTE and tethering would totally make me happy.

This is a brilliant idea.

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

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.

Here's the difference between urls:

Posted: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230387360...

Google: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20140411-711057.html

Why not post the google one and save us the collective time lost?

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?

Well it would lock them into the Amazon ecosystem...

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)

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

The latest Kindle Fire works perfectly for me. I even installed the Google Play apps I wanted through an APK downloader and sideloading.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

"Web apps are the future" is the new "This is the year of Linux on the desktop".

You're so right.

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?

>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.

That's like saying no one will agree on HDMI, or some other interface. The standards are crippled. But look at opengl, java, and c as amazing cross platform technologies that revolutionized computing in some way. Saying the only way to do something cool is to build a walled garden sounds is such a recent point of view, as compared to cross platform development.

You don't get to make that comparison until 10 more years pass and people are still saying the same thing. Give the web a bit more time, it's tough to build responsive, native-feeling, frameworks on mobile, but the delta between web apps and native apps are narrowing every year. Soon that delta will be smaller than the cost of developing separate apps for ever-more devices. In all likelihood you have some web apps on your phone today that you don't realize are just web views.

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.

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.

AWS has Amazon Linux: 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.

I thought they were a Redhat shop. In which case, far far too late to change course!

Maybe I'm showing ignorance, but what about Redhat makes it far too late to change course?

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.

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?

>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) Pretty neat stuff.

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

Probably Fire OS.

Now all they need is a search engine ...

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.

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