Last year when Amazon launched the Fire Phone, the device turned out to be quite a flop and we’ve seen Amazon gradually slashing the price of the device, with the latest price cut dropping the phone down to $130. That being sad, it seems that the disaster of the first Fire Phone could have potentially put Amazon off for good.
A report from The Wall Street Journal has revealed that the company could be considering giving up on making smartphones in the future. While this has yet to be confirmed, the report claims that their sources informed them that Amazon has laid off a bunch of engineers from its Lab126 division, a place where the company creates their top-secret hardware, such as tablets and smartphones.
The layoff is also expected to see the discontinuation of some of the projects being done at Lab126, one of which is apparently a large-screen tablet. Assuming that the speculation is correct, this seems to go against what Amazon’s CEO said last year when he promised that more Fire Phones were on its way, but perhaps they reevaluated the situation and decided that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.
After all releasing Android devices, whether forked or not, would basically mean having to compete with more established smartphone giants such as Samsung and LG, and to a certain extent it would also mean having to compete against Apple and the iPhone. In any case since this has yet to be confirmed, take it with a grain of salt for now, but would you be disappointed if there are no more Fire Phones in Amazon’s future?
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