Rumor: Amazon is working on smartphones again

Amazon has started working on smartphones again, according to a new rumor. The devices would be called Ice and reportedly have Google apps on board, unlike the Fire tablets, among others. Amazon has already released a smartphone before.

Where the Fire Phone was a high-end smartphone, the Ice is just about cheap smartphones that should be released in countries such as India, reports Gadgets 360. The price that the site mentions, 6000 rupees, comes down to about 82 euros.

For that, users get a phone with a screen between 5.2″ and 5.5″, with an unknown resolution. The soc will be a Qualcomm Snapdragon 435, with eight Cortex A53 processor cores at up to 1.4GHz and an Adreno 505 GPU. The Amazon phone is said to have 2GB of lpddr3 memory and 16GB of storage.

According to Gadgets 360, the phone runs on Android 7.1 and has Google Assistant on board. The step to provide Google services is striking, because Amazon does not do this on its Fire tablets and did not do so with the Fire Phone from 2014. Many services compete with those of Google. For example, the web store has its own download store on Android under the name Appstore and Amazon has a competitor for Google Assistant with Alexa.

In addition to this cheap model, Amazon would be working on even more phones. It is unknown when the Amazon phones will be released.

Fire Phone