Expect Amazon’s affordable ‘Project Aria’ smartphone to hit Europe, the US and China in 2014, according to apparenly leaked documents.
There’s been chatter of a budget value Amazon smartphone for a while now, but a freshly leaked internal document point at a 2014 launch for the ‘Project Aria’ device. The slippery document in question suggests strategies for joining the smartphone wars in Europe, the US and China, and the first Amazon smartphone – code-named Project Aria – could hit store shelves this year, if all goes to plan.
Amir Efrati at The Information, who reported on the leaked doc, suggests that Amazon will keep the smartphone cheap to encourage sales, the same strategy adopted for the Kindle tablet range. Expect a cost that’s ‘a small fraction of the iPhone’s $550-and-up price tag’.
We sincerely hope the leaks are for real, as a great-value Android handset could provide stiff competition for the likes of Motorola’s Moto G, and encourage other manufacturers to price their handsets more competitively. Of course, like the Kindle tablets, we imagine any Amazon-branded smartphones will tie in heavily to the retailer’s ecosystem – so will therefore be of most value to fans of the Instant video streaming services and Kindle store.
Would you be interested in an Amazon smartphone, and why? Let us know in the comments below.
Leave a Reply