While everyone has been trying to forget the abysmal Amazon Fire phone, the company is trying to redeem itself with its customers and is reportedly working on a new kind of smartphone that is less rigid than the Fire was, and will also be more open and less intrusive than before. The phone hopes to be the opposite of the Fire and to that testament, the company has branded it “Ice”.
According to Forbes, strategically, Amazon is at a point in its lifetime where it would want to integrate Alexa into its own ecosystem of mobile devices. The phone would also be marketed towards countries like India, from which Amazon faces plenty of demand in terms of sales. India is also a potential market, since the country has the population of both America and the EU combined, who can take advantage of Amazon’s offerings. The new smartphone by Amazon will be cheaper and will do better in a country that prefers cheaper goods compared to countries like the US and the UK.
The phone will have access to Google’s service and apps and will not be completely regulated by Amazon’s own workings and policies, much like the first Fire phone was. Users will have full access to the Play Store and the phone could potentially come in Android software as a whole, instead of Amazon’s own OS. As far the specifications of the phone, they will be entry-level specifications which will allow the phone to come with either a 5.2-inch or a 5.5-inch screen, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, a rear fingerprint sensor and a Snapdragon 435 processor. The phone will supposedly come in at a cost of $93 at launch, but that is subject to change. Even the possibility of Alexa being baked into the OS would be subject to change at this rate, since development stages are very early.
According to CNet, the phone will, in fact, run Android Nougat 7.1.1 and the phone will probably not make its way outside of India for a while, since the company is not planning on releasing to regions such as the US, UK and Australia. The first Fire phone was a flop and offered nothing of relevance to users except ads to push them into buying things from their online marketplace. Amazon is taking a somewhat different approach to creating its hardware this time around, but unlike the Fire’s reputation, we hope that the Ice’s reception isn’t lukewarm.