Satellite news?
A satellite phone could add a bumper to an Ai investment crash or at least justify more satellites.
Sorry, Amazon, you couldn't pick a worse time to bring a phone to market: IDC analyst
Right product, wrong time? Amazon is reported to be developing a new smartphone, its first since 2014, and, according to industry tracker IDC, it will face entrenched competition with better products and a market that is expected to contract by double digits. “Amazon is unlikely to build a better smartphone than Apple, Samsung …
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Friday 20th March 2026 22:00 GMT FirstTangoInParis
Design strategy for the Fire was fundamentally flawed. Forcing users to put a bank card on the user account AND enforcing one-click purchasing was lethal for anyone, especially those with dodgy fingers. Oh and only having a handful of apps.
Keep to selling tat. Honestly Jeff you really don’t need the money.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 00:25 GMT el_oscuro
General Boycott.
At one point, I was one of Amazon's most loyal customers. That was a long time ago. Now after the Bezos suck up to Trump, I have canned the WaPo and Kindle. Not to mention shopping. They used to be my go to store, but now I only buy stuff from them that I can't find elsewhere. This is part of my ongoing "General Boycott" which also includes Trump suck ups such Target, Goya, Uline, Target, and a bunch of others.
These big companies are nearly impossible to avoid completely but you can certainly give them a lot less of your money. Bezos alone has lost $1000s from me.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 15:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: General Boycott.
They'll suck up to any political leader if it suits their purposes - I don't think that's a particular reason to boycott them (there are plenty of other reasons to do so though).
If you boycott every large company which cosies up to politicians you won't have many (if any) left to choose from!
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Saturday 21st March 2026 05:19 GMT Neil Barnes
Re: while also putting Amazon shopping at the center of the experience
Can't comment on that - I was referring to the crap that's available for sale, from manufacturers unheard of with too many consonants in their names. (With 'you have been selected to be eligible for FREE Amazon Prime - for the first month')
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Monday 23rd March 2026 11:37 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: while also putting Amazon shopping at the center of the experience
I've commented on this before. Not everything listed on Amazon Shopping comes from Amazon. Part of the Amazon Market place is more like ebay than anything else, advertising stuff from anybody who signs up as a seller.
But if you limit yourself to "Sold by Amazon" or "Fulfilled by Amazon", the experience is not quite so bad.
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Sunday 22nd March 2026 09:26 GMT MachDiamond
Re: while also putting Amazon shopping at the center of the experience
"Prime Video is basically a home for B movies. "
I've been highly disappointed in the cinema for ages now. There's so little that makes me want to see anything on the big screen and only a few more that interest me enough to expend the energy to push the ON button of the TV remote. The latest rendition of Dune was horrible. Too much DIE rewriting of the characters even if the effects were top notch.
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Saturday 21st March 2026 00:41 GMT IGotOut
WTF
Jeronimo said. “So while an Amazon device strategy makes sense in an AI-centric world, execution risk is extremely high.....but the real challenge is not execution; it is choosing the right category where it can deliver meaningful, defensible value in an AI-first world.” ®
Sorry Jeronimo, you're as fucking deluded as every other crack smoking AI boosting moron.
Just go do what others like yourself do...fuck off to Goa and "find yourself". You'll still be an obnoxious twat, but at least you won't be helping destroying the planet quite so much.
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Sunday 22nd March 2026 09:34 GMT MachDiamond
"Nope, no chance of "backdoors" or privacy (or lack of) implications. Pretty safe, IMHO."
It's precisely that engineered lack of privacy that's what they are going for. The attack surface is convenience. The marketing will go on about things that sound clever but aren't all that useful such as being able to control your HVAC remotely with your phone or have Alexa turn on lights for you. Turn the light and video camera on in your fridge to check stock. Etc, Ad Nauseum. Every new function will come with a new EULA which will require you to agree to the next level of intrusion and data gathering. They'll get to know you better than you have bothered to get to know yourself. If you did know yourself as well, there would be no need for any of that crap. For $16.99, you will be able to order a full psychological evaluation of your tech addicted kids with mapping, activity patterns and an analysis of their sweat in real time. So will everybody else.
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Sunday 22nd March 2026 09:47 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Yes, that's a (gulp) brilliant idea
"I don't believe people who buy Apple phones want freedom from control of Apple."
They aren't even thinking about that. It's keeping up with the Jones'. More and more it seems like people can't get by without their phone in their hand doing something mindless. The badgecam shows display people that have a meltdown when they get arrested for being jerks and their phones are taken away. Traffic stops where the person won't put their phone down to talk with the officer and even ask the officer to wait while they finish a call/text. Holy crap! You just know their horrible driving was down to their using the phone.
Give somebody a shining new toy to play with and they immediately stop thinking of privacy and who's watching over their shoulder. I bought a used iPhone to use a specific scanning app as the phone I bought had built-in LiDAR. My plan was to use the phone without a SIM just for that application. It turns out there is no way to set the phone up without giving Apple too much PII. Why? The only reason is to know exactly who I am and gather more data about me. I reformatted the phone and stuck it back on eBay. The Android phone I use for that application is SIMless and I don't log into anything via my home wi-fi. I set up a gmail account on that phone with fictitious information and don't use the account for anything other than logging in to the Play Store to get updates for that one app. I was hoping I could do the same thing with the iPhone, but couldn't. I expect somebody is going to come out with an Android phone that has LiDAR and I'll get that. The upgrade is more of a "nice to have" for the few occasions where I need the increased accuracy.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 11:33 GMT Persona
Re: Yes, that's a (gulp) brilliant idea
Keeping up with the Jones' was not my motive for buying one. I got mine because I wanted something that would require close to zero effort on my behalf. Android is a platform where people struggle to keep their phones patched and up to date with 5 versions of Android having between 10 and 20% of uses shared amongst them. This is dire from a security patching perspective. For Apple that number is 2 with 66% of users being on the latest version.
I specifically want Apple to control the patching process of my phone to keep it on the latest version (it is). indeed this was why I moved off Android a couple of years ago as patching was sporadic. No doubt my IPhone will tell me when security patching is ending. Currently 6 year old iPhones can run the latest IOS and as my phone is a bit over 2 years old I might have 4 years more use from it before I have to upgrade.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 11:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Yes, that's a (gulp) brilliant idea
The problem with unwatched auto-updates on any phone is that the patches become an avenue to install vendor spyware on the phone.
I use Android phones, and I always get a bit suspicions when an update asks for more access to the phone for an app than the previous version of the application needed.
I know that I've potentially asked for trouble by using it, but the Xaomai phone I have been using for a while has several Mi branded apps baked in, and it seems that my phone is now old enough that they feel that they have to push additional services to try to get more revenue from them by updating their apps with more 'features' requiring more permissions. I try to not use the "Mi" apps as a result, as I just don't trust them.
The problem I have is that I don't really want to carry two phones around, so I want a dual-sim phone, and there aren't that many mainstream phones with that feature sold in the UK. Plenty of Chinese ones, and some intended for non-European markets, but not in the mainstream.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 21:47 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Yes, that's a (gulp) brilliant idea
"I got mine because I wanted something that would require close to zero effort on my behalf. "
Here's where we see why privacy is going away and government surveillance is coming in. People want a high-tech device to do everything for them with no need to know what those things are doing or how they work so they can continue walking around banging off the walls while neck deep in said device.
I have no problem with my de-Googled Android phone. I don't do much else with it other than using it as a phone and a couple of photography apps for calculating exposures and tracking the sun. I've deleted the messaging app as it was just a mad waste of time and a vector for bad things. I don't do anything financial through the phone. I have cash in one pocket and a debit card in another. I'm home often enough to do everything else on a more secure desktop. The car has built-in sat nav and I don't need connectivity for it. About once a month I leave the head unit switched on so I can update the maps I want to update. Paper maps are in the seat pocket behind me. Yes, I'm so old-fashioned, but I'm not punching holes in my firewall so I can stop thinking and let other people do things for (to) me.
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 04:57 GMT doublelayer
Re: Yes, that's a (gulp) brilliant idea
Wonderful complaint you've got there. You apparently missed that what they wanted not to take effort was staying patched for security issues. Surveillance thrives when security is lacking because many security people see surveillance as an adversary it's their job to fight. Your de-Googled device may have the same benefit if the creator of your custom version builds updates quickly as many of them do. If it doesn't, then surveillance may have an easier time in your environment than something properly patched. When we're fighting against surveillance, one of the most effective things we can do is to make the effort to avoid it as low as possible because it helps others who otherwise wouldn't bother and, even if we don't care about anyone else, it gives us a bigger crowd to hide in.
If you don't want to do things with your phone, that's fine for you. It doesn't change what others want to do and the benefits of letting them do so securely. Many of the things you don't care about because you do exactly the same things with different hardware are completely possible in a privacy-preserving way on a smartphone. You've combined judgemental, wrong, and smug into a mixture that helps nobody.
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Sunday 22nd March 2026 10:00 GMT MachDiamond
"And it has real buttons!"
I'm ok with the compromise of having a touch screen on the phone. Physical buttons are just magnets for muck and often what dooms the phone as repairs can be nigh on impossible. I deleted the text app which is a good reason to root the phone so no need for a keyboard there. Anything I do that needs a keyboard, I do on my computer/laptop. I'm not going to type letters and documentation with two fingers(thumbs) when I can use many more and see what I'm going on a much larger screen. I don't have any burning need to do those things out in the field and nobody is demanding those things and won't wait until I'm back in the office.
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Saturday 21st March 2026 17:03 GMT doublelayer
Suggestions like this always confuse me. There's absolutely no chance either Amazon or Raspberry Pi would make anything like this because Amazon wouldn't make any money and Raspberry Pi does not and never has built mobile phones. There are people who make things that are kind of like this suggestion, so if anyone is going to, it would be them.
Part of the reason is that, even if that's what you want, it's so customized to one person's design that it isn't what anyone else wants. For example, a wrist phone for calls isn't in much demand because you can't hold it to your ear very well, so you're always on speaker. That's annoying in public to the caller, the callee, and those nearby. You can actually buy one if you like, though they're Android-based devices for small production runs, so they can run apps (the screen isn't big though so you can probably stop yourself from using that capability). You want someone to build a product that lacks features that most willing to buy it would want. That's not something that convinces the people who are able to do that, especially when you can obtain your goal by turning things off on something closest to what you want.
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Saturday 21st March 2026 11:25 GMT MegaSloth
Im not writing it off completely yet
If they do what they have with the tablets and sell them for a crazy low price then people may indeed buy them. But they’ve got to fix the problem the fire phone had which for me was apps oh and I believe they were locked to O2 - yeah don’t do that, oh and the weird 3D thing yeah don’t do that. Ok yeah they have an uphill battle!
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Saturday 21st March 2026 13:56 GMT Tron
J (no period) may be on to something.
Governments are consciously uncoupling kids from their smarty phones, so there may be an opportunity there.
The AI opportunity is probably to release a phone with absolutely no AI at all. That would do well.
And despite the general hate for Amazon on here, most people who can, buy their stuff through Amazon. It is worth doing simply for the payment/refund security. We all have family members who may only trust or use one or two vendors.
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Saturday 21st March 2026 16:54 GMT martinusher
Maybe they'll get it right this time.....
Amazon's Fire phone was technically a very good phone but it was useless because (in the US at least) it was tied to a single network provider. Amazon obviously thought that since Apple had done this with their initial iPhone release then they could do the same thing but that made it a non-starter.
Today what would be effectively a mobile Echo device would be a great idea except that "Alexa" has morphed into "Alexa+". Although I've was a really early adopter of the Echo I've never been able to fully embrace the full skills potential of the device because I just don't need those sorts of skills in my day to day life. Adding the plus just introduced further redundancy; I'm sure that for many the kind of informational redundancy she introduced in her plus size would be welcome by many but to me this incarnation was just a garrulous, pedantic, Valley Girl.
