A story emerged yesterday that Amazon was working with HTC to develop three new smartphones. Additional details have come to light today courtesy of a Bloomberg report. Citing two anonymous sources, it appears that the two companies have been talking since at least June. The result of this partnership may be intended for its Amazon Prime subscribers.
Through its Prime service, Amazon already offers its Instant Video service to its Kindle Fire tablets as well as Apple’s lineup of iPads, iPhones and iPods. Amazon is now looking to increase the number of devices that can access this service. Offering a cheap or even free handset to its Amazon Prime customers would certainly help it achieve this goal. Then again, offering an app across a range of mobile operating systems would likely achieve a similar goal so there has to be more to it than just that. So why go the hardware route? Perhaps the same reason it already builds its own tablets: It controls not only the hardware but the software as well by using a heavily modified version of Android.
Today’s report sheds no light on the three devices being developed. It does indicate though that Amazon has yet to make a final decision on moving forward with handsets.
Source : Bloomberg