Amazon officially refused Fire Phone production and laid off the entire development team
Makradar Technologies / / December 19, 2019
About a year ago, Amazon introduced its own smartphone called Fire Phone. Development has been presented against the background of the success of Amazon Fire tablet, which took a couple of years almost 10% of the US tablet market. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, believed in the same success for the smartphone. Until recently.
Edition of The Wall Street Journal received the informationThat Amazon company at full strength dismissed the team of engineers and Fire Phone smartphone developers. Information provided employees Lab126 - division of the company, which is engaged in production of gadgets. Its leader, John McCormack, also left the team and went to Google. Jeff Bezos declined to comment on the situation.
Your smartphone the company introduced in the summer of 2014. Among the features of the device - a series of cameras on the front panel that allows you to create the 3D effect. However, it was not enough to sell the device for as low as $ 650. Within a few months it became clear that the smartphone failed commercially and turned into huge losses for the Amazon. Western media said about the losses up to $ 1 billion.
According to the WSJ reports, the project is fully closed, the team fired. In the near future to produce Fire Phone, and other smartphones the company does not intend to. It is reported that this is also the first time in the history of Lab126, when the team reduce rather than expand. Last year, the department issued a television Fire TV set-top box, which in a few months I walked to the Apple TV the US market and has become the third most popular set-top box to USA.
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