On June 18, Amazon will announce a mysterious new device, and we’re pretty darn sure it’s going to be the crazy 3D smartphone that’s been rumoured for over a year. Here’s what the reports suggest is coming our way soon.
What will it be called?
Probably the Kindle Phone. Maybe a Kindle Fire Phone. After the barrage of Kindle-branded hardware across categories, does Amazon have another option?
Design
The renders above were obtained by BGR and portray a relatively conventional-looking phone. According to another BGR report — the blog has had a number of big Amazon scoops so props to them — the phone will have a 4.7-inch, 720p display, which would be smaller and lower resolution than 5.1-inch, 1080p Samsung Galaxy S5 and the 5-inch 1080p HTC One.
3D display and gesture controls
The phone’s billboard feature is the much rumoured 3D display. It’s not clear that Amazon plans to characterise it as 3D, but from from the video Amazon posted teasing the device, it seems the UI is very responsive to your movements to that effect. According to BGR’s reports, the UI seems like a much more sophisticated version of Apple’s parallax effect. In addition to shifting the wallpaper you’re looking at, Amazon’s phone will also shift the perspective on icons, as well as throughout Amazon’s various stores.
In addition to responding to your hand movements, the phone reportedly uses multiple cameras to track your face so that it can adjust the display as you’re glancing around the screen. The movements of the actors in Amazon’s teaser appear to confirm this.
Beyond the 3D effect, BGR reports that the phone’s software will respond to an innovative gesture control that will allow you to tilt the phone in various directions — to the point that BGR’s sources suggest you don’t need to touch the phone at all to accomplish certain tasks.
Other specs
As with Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets, the Amazon smartphone will almost definitely run a forked version of Android. Under the hood it’s be reasonable to expect a Qualcomm Snapdragon Processor and at least 2GB of RAM. Amazon’s latest fleet of Kindle Fire devices is pretty power, and we’d expect the same out of a phone.
Amazon Prime
Expect that an Amazon Prime membership to be required to get the most out of the phone, much like with the Kindle Fire. Additionally, there have been many recent rumours about an Amazon streaming music service, and a recent report from Buzzfeed suggesting a more barebones service with only older songs sounds like a perfect match for Prime bundling. Rumours even go so far as to suggest this phone might be free with Prime. That would be pretty crazy, but we’ll see.
Most of the reports from the hardware have come from a single source, BGR. But they nailed the redesign of the new Kindle Fire HDX tablets, so these leaks are probably pretty reliable. As for the Amazon Prime hook, all we can really be sure of is that there is one. Whatever it is, Amazon’s new phone is pretty much guaranteed to at least be interesting. And we’ll find out exactly how on June 18.