Amazon is widely rumored to unveil a brand spanking new 3D smartphone that it hopes will turn the smartphone industry upside down. But it's not exactly the 3D capabilities that will give the retail company the upper hand.
A series of leaks and teasers has gotten customers thinking about a 3D smartphone equipped with multiple tilted front cameras and motion sensors that activate a novel form of gesture control. The latest one is a video released by Amazon where users are filmed fascinated as they tilt a device conveniently cut out of the frame this way and that.
More analysts are compelled to believe that it is a 3D smartphone that Amazon will introduce on Wednesday. However, it's not the 3D capabilities that will most likely stir up the technology industry. After all, an Amazon 3D smartphone, if the rumors are true, is not exactly going to be the world's first glasses-free 3D smartphone. The honor goes to LG's Thrill 4G.
The real reason an Amazon smartphone is something to watch out for is, analysts predict, it could potentially change the retail space in ways we have never seen before. Remember when Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007? Book readers have never expected to make the switch from old-school books to paperless e-books displayed on the Kindle's e-ink screen, but Amazon was able to popularize e-reading when it made available to readers millions of books through the Kindle. Many of those books are even free to customers who paid $99 a year to be part of Amazon Prime.
The same model worked well for Kindle Fire, which allows users to download books, movies, TV shows and other types of media from the Amazon store. Last week, Amazon added to its library of content a new music streaming service to compete with the likes of Spotify and Pandora. The smartphone is the last remaining link to solidify Amazon's hold over the technology industry.
"Mobile is asserting not just its utility but its supremacy," says analyst James McQuivey of Forrester Research. "If you're Amazon, you're worried you're going to be cut out of the next big interface. So you jump in and make yourself relevant, whether your customer is in the bathroom, kitchen or the car. You go for broke."
The New York Times makes an example out of coconut flour. If a user searches for coconut flour on Google, a listing for the product on Amazon is seen in the first 10 search results. Google has gone the way of personalizing search by remembering what users have searched for and, in the future, will most likely be able to send out notifications based on a user's searches and current location that there's a bag of coconut flour sitting nearby inside Trader Joe's. If this happens, Amazon won't be able to sell coconut flour and plenty other things on its virtual shelves as well as it used to.
But if Amazon is truly set on releasing its own smartphone, it has massive competition to match up to. Apple's iPhones and Samsung's Android devices are the only two brands that smartphone buyers trust. A handful of technology companies have tried their hand at the brutal market, but Google's Nexus phone and Microsoft's Windows Phones are not even close to acquiring a significant mindshare. BlackBerry, which used to be a major smartphone player, doesn't even sell in the U.S. anymore. And even Facebook made efforts to introduce a smartphone, which bombed when AT&T dropped the price from $99 to a disastrous $0.99.
A competitive price tag would of course be essential for an Amazon smartphone, as it was for the Kindle Fire and high-end specs for people who can live without the latest processor or a 20-megapixel camera, although 3D capabilities would be a nice touch.
