We live in an age where the circular economy is encouraged. Reduce waste, reuse and recycle. But when it comes to tech, recycling some things is a harder sell than others.
Take the recent rumours that Amazon is considering another attempt at the smartphone market. A Reuters report claims the company has something in development that it has code-named Transformer.
Beyond that, there is very little detail on Transformer. It may or may not be a smartphone. It may or may not have apps. It could be completely voice-controlled, treading the same path as the Humane AI pin and the Rabbit R1 in an attempt to pull us away from screens.
There is no pricing, no idea on how much money Amazon has ploughed into the project nor when – even if – it will ever make it to the market.
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But it does raise a good point: do we really need another Amazon phone? Because we have been down this path before. If you don’t remember the Fire Phone, it was Amazon’s 2014 attempt to claw back some of the consumer market from Apple and Samsung.
When it was announced, it was to great fanfare. The device would support 3D and came with something called Firefly, which used the camera and image recognition to direct you to items you could buy on Amazon.
Still high from the success of the Kindle, the company had rapidly expanded its goals to first include tablets in 2011, with the launch of the Kindle Fire, and followed up with the Fire phone in 2014.
While the former may have been a natural jump for a company that was hoping to capitalise on the loyalty of Kindle e-reader users to give it an edge over the iPad, the Fire phone failed to set the tech world ablaze.
Amazon slashed the price of the unlocked phone from $650 to $199. Even dangling the carrot of a full year of Prime access in front of would-be buyers couldn’t generate enough demand for the Fire phone. Just over a year after it was launched, the device was quietly discontinued, leaving Amazon with a $170 million writedown.
Strategy
The device itself may not have been the issue, but rather the strategy behind it. Like the Fire tablets, the phone was created as a way to sell content, specifically Amazon’s own. Amazon had already limited the tablet by using its own version of Android – Fire OS – which meant it did not have access to Google’s Play Store.
While people may have been willing to take a risk on that, it seems it was a step too far for a smartphone.
This time around, Amazon is skipping the 3D – thankfully – and apparently opting for deeper integration with its Alexa digital assistant and giving Amazon a closer connection with its customers. It would give the company a direct line to its customers – and their data.
Sounds almost dystopian.
Amazon may yet pull off one of the greatest comebacks of its history. But assuming this is just another take on the smartphone, the odds are stacked against it. The smartphone market is a very different place these days when it comes to breaking through, and consumers are more aware than ever of their privacy.
But if at first you don’t succeed, the industry mantra appears to be batter consumers with it until they give in. The tech world is littered with products that failed first time around only to inspire a better second run.
Remember Google Glass? The tech giant’s smart glasses creeped people out so much that the wearers earned themselves the nickname “Glassholes”. Fourteen years on, Meta is pushing smart glasses through its partnership with Ray-Ban, and Google has been showing off its new Android XR operating system on prototype smart glasses at tech conferences.
And let’s not forget the forerunners of the iPhone. Apple had a much-derided partnership with Motorola before it launched the iPhone; even Apple chief executive Steve Jobs was said to be less than enthusiastic about the device when he presented it on stage in 2005. But the idea that people wanted music on their phones outlasted the short-lived partnership and prompted Apple to accelerate development of the iPhone.
Less clear is the future of virtual and mixed reality headsets, which Meta has also heavily backed. Last week, it announced it would take key app Horizon Worlds off the Quest platform by June, making it available only as a standalone mobile app. That came only weeks after the company made some heavy cuts to its Reality Labs workforce.
Apple is also thought to be struggling with sluggish Vision Pro sales, although it has not confirmed exact figures for the headset.
There are lessons that tech companies can take from all this. Just because you succeed at one thing, it doesn’t mean you are guaranteed to be good at all of them. You need to recognise when to call time on a particular ambition. And for some tech companies at least, there are some limitations that you cannot overcome.
