Amazon's Kindle smartphone is coming! It's 3-D! We've heard this before! But ... - VentureBeat

Take a deep breath, hold on to your hat, and take a seat: Amazon is building a smartphone.

Still there?

Sorry for the big shocker, but almost a year after reports That Amazon was testing smartphones in Asia, half a year after rumors Amazon was buying a smartphone chip processor, a year after more reports That Amazon was building its own smartphone, the five months after unveiling a notifications system That would look really nice on a smartphone, and six months after probably wild speculation That Amazon was going to unveil a smartphone for the pre-Christmas shopping spree in 2012, there’s yet another report That Amazon is building a smartphone .

But this one has a 3-D screen.

The Wall Street Journal Says That Amazon is building at least two smartphones, including a high-end model with 3-D graphics and retina-tracking technology thatusers can navigate content on “using just Their Eyes.” plus an audio-only ‘content streaming device. “

Harrumph.

Amazon is almost certainly working on a smartphone and almost certainly planning to release it in 2013. There’s just too much smoke for there not to be fire. And having made its bet on digital content being the growth engine of the company’s future success – 12 of the 15 highlights in Amazon’s Recent earnings release were about digital content – A Smartphone That makes use of Amazon’s recently-expanded app store and burgeoning virtual shelves of ebooks, TV shows, movies, and all other forms of digital content makes way too much sense.

But a couple grains of salt.

Amazon doing now? made its bones in the tablet market by offering the absolutely latest and greatest technology, but by presenting a solid thing at a rock-bottom price. So I’m a little skeptical about all the wild 3-D speculation – especially Because thatcould be a sweet datapoint plant for the company to identify leak sources. And, in reality, a company the size of Amazon, like Apple, is working on many different projects at any given time. Some of them will come to market, and some of them will not.

One company That can not be happy about Amazon impending smartphone plans, however, has to be Google. Amazon has Essentially hijacked Android for its Kindle offerings, taking the open-source mobile operating system That Google has underdeveloped, stripping out the Google app store, Google apps, and Google branding, and Replacing them with its own offerings. Amazon will doubtless adopt the exact same strategy with any smartphone play – as Samsung might as well.

And, given the fact That the Kindle is probably the leading Android-based tablet, it has the potential to do well in smartphones as well.

Of course, incumbent leader in Android sales Samsung might have a thing or two to say about that.

Image credit: Brian Sawyer / Flickr