Although their first attempt turned out to be one of the industry's biggest flops, it's now being reported that Amazon is planning a comeback, a decade after the disastrous launch of the Fire Phone.
The new initiative, known internally as "Transformer," is said to focus on AI and is intended to be a personal assistant you carry with you, with deep integration into Alexa and Amazon's other services, from shopping to streaming. A clear change compared to the Fire Phone, which when launched in 2014, became one of the company's biggest failures ever. It was expensive, had a meagre selection of apps, and its "features" felt mostly like a list of gimmicks.
This time, Amazon seems to want to rethink things from the ground up. Rumours point to a more AI-driven interface, perhaps even without a traditional app store. At the same time, there's a clear ambition to make the phone a constant link between the user and Amazon's ecosystem, which if we're being cynical, also means even more data.
The problem is that the competition is fierce. Apple and Samsung are comfortably at the top, and it will take a lot for Amazon to succeed in joining the fight for the remaining crumbs.
Do you think Amazon has a chance of making a comeback in the mobile market?