Xbox Cofounder Is Secretly Engaged on an Amazon Phone

The dream of an Amazon telephone isn’t useless but. More than a decade after Amazon launched its first telephone—the Fire Phone and its largely forgotten 3D display screen—to poor critiques and lackluster gross sales, the e-commerce large is reportedly taking one other stab at making a cellular machine.

According to Reuters, the telephone (codenamed “Transformer”) is below growth by Amazon’s units unit, led by former Microsoft Surface chief Panos Panay, and would hook up with Alexa in addition to make it simpler to make use of Amazon’s numerous companies. J Allard, who cofounded Xbox and was the visionary behind the Zune, is reportedly answerable for a “ZeroOne” group that’s creating the telephone inside the units division.

“As envisioned, the new phone’s personalization features would make buying from Amazon.com, watching Prime Video, listening to Prime Music or ordering food ⁠from partners like Grubhub easier than ever,” the report mentioned. Instead of apps and entry to third-party app shops just like the Google Play retailer—one thing that doomed the Fire Phone—this new Amazon telephone may depend on AI options as an alternative.

It’s not a very bogus concept. Some tech CEOs, together with Nothing’s Carl Pei, consider telephone apps “are going to disappear” inside the subsequent 7 to 10 years, changed by AI and “agents” that do stuff on command for you. Samsung and Google are already toying with agentic computing on their newest Galaxy and Pixel telephones, respectively. At the Galaxy S26 launch in February, Samsung launched an AI characteristic referred to as “Automated app action” that permits you to enter a immediate to name an Uber experience. Rather than tapping by the Uber app your self, the AI “agent” would do it for you.

Reuters’ sources warning that the telephone might be canceled “if the strategy shifts or due to financial concerns.” Hell, it seems like Amazon remains to be very a lot exploring kind components that the potential new telephone may take. Apparently, Amazon has thought-about common touchscreen slabs and dumbphone designs. The report claims that Amazon has appeared to the minimalist Light Phone as one supply of inspiration, although it’s unclear if the telephone will in the end operate as a “secondary” machine meant for countering display screen time.

Breaking into the smartphone market once more received’t be straightforward, even for Amazon. The U.S. remains to be largely a duopoly dominated by Apple and Samsung. Consumers don’t merely purchase a smartphone anymore—they purchase into an ecosystem of smartwatches, tablets, computer systems, and sensible dwelling units that revolve round a smartphone. Once you select your ecosystem, it’s laborious to depart it for one more, particularly when you have different units that work extra seamlessly with a particular telephone model.

Amazon has Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Alexa-powered sensible TVs and sensible dwelling units, and even Eero networking gear. It simply lacks a telephone to attach all of them. Whatever form Amazon’s second telephone takes (once more, if it’s not shelved), the one factor that the corporate is unlikely to return to is the Fire Phone’s 3D-tracking expertise, which used cameras embedded within the machine’s corners to trace your eye actions.