Not too long ago, Amazon announced their own smartphone dubbed as the Fire Phone. The handset comes with some innovative features on board, which can be quite helpful on some occasions.
Amazon Fire Phone is set to go on sale on July, and is available for pre-orders on Amazon and AT&T. But, the question is: is the device good enough to compete in the already crowded smartphone industry? It’s a tough one to answer at the moment, but according to a new report from Digitimes, Amazon may be able to sell around three million smartphones by the end of 2014.
Total shipments of Amazon’s Fire phones are expected to reach 2-3 million units by year-end 2014, which is unlikely to make a significant impact on the global smartphone market, according to sources in Taiwan’s handset supply chain.
Amazon is outsourcing production of the Fire phones to the Foxconn Group, with initial shipments totaling 300,000-500,000 units a month, the sources revealed.
The report further mentions, citing Taiwan’s handset supply chain sources, that initial shipments amounts to 300-500k units a month, which is an impressive number.
However, I’m not really sure about these estimates, not because Amazon doesn’t have the potential, but because the report surfaced from Digitimes. They are correct at times, but they have a very shaky track record.
Despite of several innovative features, the device still misses some key features that are available in most of the Android devices in the market, and that is, Google services. Amazon devices run a forked version of Android which have nothing to do with Google or its services, even the app store on the device is not from Google. Secondly, the price tag it carries is still a little high, compared to other high-end devices in the market.
Anyway, let’s just take this with proverbial amount of salt, and wait for Amazon Fire phone to hit retail.
Source: Digitimes, PhoneArena