Amazon smartphone delayed, say supply chain sources

Amazon is said to be having issues sticking to its initial roadmap that pegged the Amazon smartphone for production in Q2 2013. When will we actually get to see it?

The industry gossip purveyors at Digitimes are back at it with a report that’s somehow amusingly titled “Amazon much-fanfared smartphone may be delayed, say sources”. I don’t know about you, but I am watching tech news pretty closely, and I haven’t heard anyone “fanfaring” the still unconfirmed smartphone from Amazon.

What I did hear however, is plenty of speculation about the perpetual coming-soon device, starting with a Bloomberg report from back in July and finishing in December with a report about the 5 million units that Amazon supposedly ordered to Foxconn.

Now Digitimes claims that, due to “issues related to its mobile platform”, the Amazon smartphone won’t enter mass production in June as initially planned. The report originates from an unnamed source in the phone’s flat panel supply channel.

Initially, Amazon was hoping to have its first smartphone ready to enter production by March, with the first batches coming off the assembly line in Q2 2013. Now, sources say that Foxconn and Amazon are unlikely to be able to stick to that roadmap, because the phone is still undergoing “engineering verification” testing, a preliminary stage before the final “production verification test”.

In other words, it’s possible that Amazon will only start selling its smartphone in late summer. Knowing Jeff Bezos and his company, the device will run a heavily modified version of Android that will put Amazon’s ecosystem front and center.

Personally, I don’t have many expectations from the Amazon phone, seeing the way the retail giant dumbed down Android on the Kindle Fire tablets. How about you?

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