More than 10 years after leaving aside the Fire Phone, amazon reportedly plans to launch another smartphone, this time focused on Alexa. According to Reuters, the phone, codenamed transformerwill revolve around Amazon’s AI assistant, although Alexa won’t ‘necessarily be the phone’s main operating system’.
Transformer is currently in development within the group ZeroOne from Amazon, led by J. Allardwho previously worked at Zune and Xbox in Microsoft. Allard’s team has explored both smartphone and ‘feature phone’ designsinspired by the minimalist Light Phonewhose latest version costs $700, has a black and white screen and lacks an app store.
Poor app availability was a big problem for the original Fire Phone and something Amazon may try to avoid entirely this time around. According to people familiar with the new phone, ‘integrate artificial intelligence capabilities into the device’ has been a central objective, which could mean that Transformer relies on mini-apps like those available on ChatGPT, rather than a full app store.
The development team also wants the phone to facilitate purchases through Amazon and partners like Grubhub, as well as streaming content from Prime Video and Prime Music.
There’s still no timetable for when, if ever, Amazon will release Transformer or how much it might cost. The original Fire Phone was released for $199, but it failed to take off and Amazon scrapped it a year after its launch.
Amazon has tried to keep up with its rivals in AI in recent years, but its main product, the Alexa assistant, recently revamped in some regions, has yet to convince users. This same year, after being automatically updated to Alexa Pluswhich uses new language models, several users posted complaints online saying that was ‘flooded with ads’ and took longer to respond to your queries.