Rumors are swirling today about two tech giants, Amazon and Microsoft, both rolling out branded smartphones. One of these is a good idea: Amazon's phone could really shake up the mobile market, albeit in a way that will make geeks very uncomfortable. For Microsoft, though, building its own phone is a distraction, and one that could lead to the whole Windows Phone edifice tumbling down. The company has better ways to spend its money supporting Windows Phone 8.
Amazon Phone Good
Amazon has a broad, coherent set of content services that have never properly come together on a mobile phone, and the company has been doing a great job of building a unified platform on its Kindle Fire tablets.
Yeah, sure, you can download Kindle, the Amazon Appstore Amazon MP3, and the Amazon shopping app on any Android phone. But they are disconnected from each other and often duplicated by built-in services; they definitely don't play starring roles.
Amazon's UI reimagining of Android into easy-to-use "Amdroid" isn't as compelling on phones as on tablets; what looks clear and bold on a tablet may actually look too simple, almost childish, on a phone. But Amazon could easily create a phone that offers seamless access to all of Amazon's services and the Web, just like the Kindle Fire does.
And Amazon's reimagining of pricing service plans could really shake things up. I'm thinking of the Kindle Fire 8.9's AT&T data plan, offering 250MB per month for $4.16 per month. Subsidizing devices is old hat. Carriers have been doing that for years. But now Amazon is subsidizing the service plans.
Presumably this pays off for Amazon because Amdroid-powered devices are veritable buying machines, churning sales and Prime subscriptions like nobody's business. This could apply to a phone, too, and there are ways Amazon could further extend its sales-generating power. For instance, including a RedLaser-like bar code scanning ability on an Amazon phone would prove that pretty much anything you can buy in a brick-and-mortar store, you can get cheaper on Amazon.
Expensive smartphone service plans are one of the major barriers to adoption right now. MetroPCS has cheap plans, but it isn't sold nationwide. T-Mobile's Value Plans are also well-priced, but you have to buy an unsubsidized phone to enjoy them. Amazon could get smartphones into more hands with a heavily subsidized model, making the money back later.
Of course, this is also a phone freedom activist's nightmare. Geeks are fighting to make phones less carrier-dependent and give consumers a wider choice of service plans and devices, but the Amazon phone will be utterly, completely, and totally shackled.
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