These days, the majority of smartphones are good, but a dime a dozen — the floor for a quality phone is higher, but the ceiling has plateaued. The only truly gigantic differences between competing phones nowadays are brand loyalty,display size, and operating system (or how much bloat is plastered on top of the same operating system). Regardless of this, Amazon is rumored to think that it can break into the market and make a splash with its own smartphone, and now, some leaked pictures of the device might just corroborate the company’s mentality.
For what seemed like an internet eternity, rumors were swirling about regarding Facebook entering the smartphone market with its own hardware. Eventually (for now), that fizzled out and turned into Facebook Home, what essentially amounted to an Android skin — if you don’t launch your own phone, at least you can try to disguise other phones as your own. For nearly as long as the Facebook phone rumors persisted, there were always rumblings of an Amazon phone. Now, BGR got its hands on what it purports to be that very Amazon smartphone. As you can see from the images above and below, this leak doesn’t consist of a blurry shot taken at a bar with poor lighting. If the clear-as-day images do indeed depict an Amazon smartphone, then it looks like Amazon took an iPhone and smashed it into the middle of the outside casing of a Lumia phone.
According to BGR, the weird iPhone-in-Lumia design is actually the result of a case that’s screwed onto the phone proper, obscuring the true design of the device. Reports suggest the smartphone measures in at 4.7 inches, which would be small compared to the latest big-name phone launches, such as the Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8. The phone is said to only have a 720p display — a resolution that would’ve been brilliant a few years ago, but now falls behind the increasingly standard 1080p — and is also said to pack 2GB of RAMunder the hood, as well as a currently undisclosed Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. The phone will likely run FireOS, a forked version of Android that Amazon uses. However, if you look closely at the leaked shots, you’ll notice something suspicious: multiple front-facing cameras, five in all.
Each corner of the phone is home to a front-facing camera, while the usual front camera used for video chat and taking selfies — and presumably Amazon’s Mayday service — is located toward the edge of the phone in the customary position. Reports claim that the way Amazon plans to utilize these four corner cameras is how the company aims to set itself apart from the saturated smartphone market: a glassesless 3D display. Unlike the Nintendo 3DS, which uses specialized display tech to achieve the 3D effect without glasses, Amazon’s phone will somehow use the four cameras as a tracking system in order to create the 3D effect. A safe guess is that the phone will use the cameras to discern a user’s orientation when looking at the phone, then shift the display to work in conjunction with that perspective to simulate 3D. However, while BGR trumpets the 3D as being a major feature of the phone, other outlets familiar with the matter, such as TechCrunch, aredownplaying the feature, saying it will be very limited out of the box.
Rumors have it that Amazon will announce the phone by June with plans to ship by September. So, we won’t have to wait very long to see if Amazon adds another device under its flagship banner, and so soon after the Amazon Fire TV.
