The Wall Street Journal reports Amazon is preparing to release its long rumoured smartphone later this year. Over the past several weeks, the company has reportedly been showing prototypes of the device to developers in San Francisco.
Amazon will likely announce the smartphone by the end of June and launch the device by the end of September. Several people who have been briefed about the company’s plans said:
“Amazon hopes to distinguish its phone in a crowded market with a screen capable of displaying seemingly three-dimensional images without special glasses, these people said. They said the phone would employ retina-tracking technology embedded in four front-facing cameras, or sensors, to make some images appear to be 3-D, similar to a hologram, the people said.”
The phone was first rumoured in July of 2012 and will reportedly join and complement Amazon’s line of Kindle tablets and E-readers. The smartphone from the company is set to compete with offerings from Apple, Samsung, and other smartphone manufacturers.
The 3-D screen technology can sense the movement of a person’s eyes and whether the screen is moving closer to a user’s face, according to people familiar with the matter. In response, the phone will be able to automatically zoom into images as it moves closer to a user’s face and could manipulate text and images as a person moves the phone.
The smartphone may introduce features that pair with the company’s newly released set-top box, the Amazon FireTV, and may focus heavily on gaming.
Apple is expected to release their next-generation iPhone in the second half of the year along with iOS 8 and Apple’s rumoured iWatch. The company’s new flagship is rumoured to come in two different screen sizes, 4.7-inches and 5.5-inches respectively. The new device will reportedly feature an upgraded A8 64-bit CPU, a better display, and an improved camera with optical image stabilization.
