Yes, according to Citigroup Investment Research supply chain checks in Asia. The report seems to verify rumours that Amazon, who recently launched the Amazon Kindle Fire the other day are going all in into the gadget market. The report goes on to say, and I quote:
“We believe FIH is now jointly developing the phone with Amazon. However, we believe that Amazon will pay non-recurring engineering fees to FIH, but the device and multiple components will actually be manufactured by Hon Hai’s TMS business group (the same business group that makes Amazon’s e-reader and the 8.9-inch Amazon tablet.) We believe the smartphone will adopt Texas Instrument’s OMAP 4 processor and is very likely to adopt Qualcomm’s dual mode 6-series standalone baseband given Qualcomm has been a longtime baseband supplier for Amazon’s e-reader.”
Amazon are known for their epic forays into new territories and they are by no means an insignificant player in the hardware market in as much as they will be entering a market ruled by Titans such as Apple, BlackBerry and Samsung.
Pundits however speculate that with Amazon shifting to a Service Oriented Approach to all its services and more specifically in creating Platform as a Service frameworks with Amazon Cloud, they need the infrastructure to make it easier for users to interact with these new services.
In addition to this, Amazon is also looking towards getting some extra traction in its cloud music services, which seem to work very well with smartphones. Jeff Bezos is a man well-known for making his bed and laying in it so the Amazon Smartphone story will be an interesting one to follow.
