A couple of days ago, Amazon unveiled the first ever smartphone, the Amazon Fire. Given that Apple more or less kicked off the smartphone race back in 2007 with the first-gen iPhone back in 2007, and now that we’re in 2014, doesn’t that make Amazon about 7 years too late into the game?
After all we’re sure many would agree that the market for smartphones has become saturated, especially in developing markets, so how does that explain Amazon’s decision? Well it seems that Amazon doesn’t think they are late to the smartphone game, at least not according to the company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, who had recently sat down with a chat with The New York Times.
When asked if they thought that they were too late to the game, Bezos replied with, “I think in the whole evolution of this, we’re still pretty early. I don’t want to judge before all the facts are in, but I think this wireless thing is going to be big.” He later adds, “If we go back in time just five, six, seven years, we’re talking about different players — Nokia, BlackBerry and others. Things change very rapidly in this area.”
It is true that back then Nokia and BlackBerry were still pretty big players, and while Nokia has had a new lease on life thanks to Microsoft’s Windows Phone and was subsequently bought out by Microsoft, BlackBerry has been somewhat struggling to find their place in the market as of late.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire managed to have an impact on the tablet market due to its affordability which prompted their competitors to release cheaper tablets as well, so it will be interesting to see if Amazon’s smartphone efforts will have a similar impact on the smartphone market as well. What do you guys think?
Filed in . Read more about Amazon.