
Amazon Preparing to Release Smartphone - dannynemer
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20140411-711057.html
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VikingCoder
I wish instead they would get their Android-Kindle products certified by
Google, so we could get the Google Play Store Apps on them, and that they
would put Amazon Instant Watch and Music Store as Google Play Store Apps, so I
could rent movies on my Android devices.

But I'm not one of those marketing geniuses who loves to create walled gardens
and captured verticals and synergized markets and all that...

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TillE
The Google Play Store is a nightmare for smaller developers. Unlike every
other app platform I can think of (including Amazon's) which just send you
nice tidy royalty payments, Google expects you to handle the sales tax for
each and every customer, everywhere in the world.

And yet virtually nobody talks about this. I'm quite certain that any
developer without an accountant is either getting it wrong or ignoring it
completely. This is the reason that if I release a game for Android, it will
only be through Amazon.

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cageface
Are you sure about this? My reading of this document is that they _do_ collect
and process taxes in most jurisdictions:

[https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-
developer/answ...](https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-
developer/answer/138000?hl=en)

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philo23
I'd really love for Amazon to make a phone that uses the same eink screen as
the kindle paperwhite. Just a basic, no frills phone with a similar long
lasting battery life to the paperwhite.

No doubt if they are planning a smart phone though it'll be more similar to
their Kindle Fire tablets which is fair enough, but hey I can dream..

~~~
vvvnnnnvvv
Yes! Battery life is a killer feature for me. I'd be willing to sacrifice a
lot of functionality for something that was as hardy and needed as little
recharging as my kindle.

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thinkagain22
Grr. Stop upvoting stuff we can't read without jumping through hoops.

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VikingCoder
It's not much of a hoop - you search for the article headline on Google, and
you can read it for free without sign-up.

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svas
Here's the difference between urls:

Posted:
[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230387360...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303873604579495940522902678)

Google: [http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-
CO-20140411-711057.html](http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-
CO-20140411-711057.html)

Why not post the google one and save us the collective time lost?

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iscrewyou
[https://www.google.com/#q=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fnews...](https://www.google.com/#q=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2FSB10001424052702303873604579495940522902678)

Would they sell it at or close cost like most Amazon hardware? I don't see a
lot of the customer using "amazon content (movies and music, which amazon is
trying to bet heavy on)" on their tiered data plans.

Or sell above cost and join the market of, oh so many, other handsets?

~~~
sliverstorm
You can still access Amazon content on WiFi, and they could play some games
with caching. Flash is sold at a premium (wasn't the iPhone like, $100 to go
from 8GB to 16GB?) but not actually all that expensive.

Google Music is a perfect example, actually. I allow it to stream music over
3G, but it still aggressively manages a local cache of music anywhere from
1-2GB, leveraging WiFi to save data. (It would use more if I didn't have a
dinky 8GB device)

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kbd
After my experience with the first-gen Kindle Fire, I'm disinclined to ever
buy hardware from Amazon again.

~~~
mkr-hn
The latest Kindle Fire works perfectly for me. I even installed the Google
Play apps I wanted through an APK downloader and sideloading.

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davidw
Amazon is great for content, but not having the Google apps like gmail, maps,
and so on is kind of a dealbreaker. Also, with a Nexus phone, Google keeps
creating updates for it. I don't get the impression Amazon is so concerned
with keeping things updated like that.

~~~
mkr-hn
My Kindle Fire gets regular system updates. The latest was a few days ago. I
don't know what the updates involve aside from updates like Goodreads
integration, but I do know it's not getting worse. It was already nearly
perfect the day I got it. The only update I'd want is Google Play, and that's
not a deal breaker since I can sideload the important stuff.

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dclowd9901
Oh goodie, another fucking platform to market, design, develop and test for.

~~~
jquery
This is why HTML5 will win in the end. In a few years all your apps will be
web-views again. Proprietary, walled-garden standards don't scale horizontally
across platforms.

~~~
webwielder
"Web apps are the future" is the new "This is the year of Linux on the
desktop".

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jvagner
You're so right.

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alttab
If Apple and Google put half as much effort into mobile web browsing as they
did in proprietary platform development, we'd be further by now.

The fact that in today's "build software people want" world you need to do it
three times, or at the very least in 3 different languages on the front-end is
fucking crazy.

Now, the HTML5 problem will solve the platform. Especially with local storage
and high performance browser graphics! Boom shaka-laka. Coming soon hopefully.

The problem after that is much more trivial - responsive layout. Can you
really write an all purpose app that responds to desktop, and all shapes of
mobile and tablet without having to think about each form factor individually?

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anon1385
>If Apple and Google put half as much effort into mobile web browsing as they
did in proprietary platform development, we'd be further by now.

I doubt it. More likely we would have a bunch of browsers that followed an
even more divergent set of standards.

Web standards are slow to improve because they involve getting a bunch of
competing companies to agree to things, often things that are against their
commercial interests. It's ridiculous for people to claim to support web
standards but then complain about the slow pace. That is an inevitable part of
the process of trying to get everybody in the world to agree on a single
platform API that monopolises all user facing software. Native platforms move
forwards more quickly because Google doesn't need to get permission from Apple
and Mozilla and Microsoft before they add a new feature to Android. The web
has to be a slow moving lowest-common-denominator type platform or it loses
the only advantage it has, which is that it runs just about everywhere.

If you want a platform that is fast moving, exciting, and cutting edge then
you don't want web standards at all, because web standards are exactly the
opposite of those things, by design.

~~~
alttab
That's like saying no one will agree on HDMI, or some other interface. The
standards are crippled. But look at opengl, java, and c as amazing cross
platform technologies that revolutionized computing in some way. Saying the
only way to do something cool is to build a walled garden sounds is such a
recent point of view, as compared to cross platform development.

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transfire
I have to admit I am very surprised Amazon hasn't bought out Canonical in
order to inherit a large install base and build their own ecosystem.

~~~
sliverstorm
I thought they were a Redhat shop. In which case, far far too late to change
course!

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alttab
Maybe I'm showing ignorance, but what about Redhat makes it far too late to
change course?

~~~
sliverstorm
The differences are not large, but your institutional knowledge, existing
management scripts/tools, custom packages, and (presumed) working relationship
with Redhat the company all contribute to making one wonder whether it is
worth it to switch hundreds of thousands of servers (millions?) to another
distro. You _could_ , but at what cost for what gain? Why, upgrades are
trouble enough.

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dalek2point3
I'm wondering how come no one is talking about the elephant in the room.
Google Services! No one really cares about Android's "open"-ness anyone,
because without Goog services a smartphone is virtually nothing -- you need
maps, youtube and gmail at the very least. AMZN has a plan for that?

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rory096
>They said the phone would employ retina-tracking technology embedded in four
front-facing cameras, or sensors, to make some images appear to be 3-D,
similar to a hologram, the people said.

Reminds me of the zSpace. ([https://zspace.com](https://zspace.com)) Pretty
neat stuff.

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danford
Sounds neat. Any word on what OS it's running?

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mkr-hn
Probably Fire OS.

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rajacombinator
Now all they need is a search engine ...

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alttab
Google.com's search engine gives you "information" and tries to sell stuff.
Amazon.com's search engine finds you products when you're trying to buy stuff.

