The Hidden Agenda of Amazon’s New Phone (discovering mobile services competition...)

There was a time, not long ago, when Amazon was for shopping, Google was for searching and advertising, Apple was for sleekly designed gadgets with even sleeker user interfaces, and Facebook was for keeping in touch with friends. But the bigger these businesses get, the more pressure they face to grow even larger, and the more they covet each other’s customers. Being the best at what they do is no longer good enough. Now, these giants want to be the best at what the other guys are doing too. They’re all turning into each other. Google is becoming Facebook–and vice versa. Apple is becoming Google–and vice versa. And, naturally, Amazon is following suit.

Yes, with the Fire Phone, Amazon is making an aggressive move into Apple and Google’s territory in the smartphone market. On stage, Bezos directly compared the quality of the Fire Phone camera to the iPhone 5S and the Samsung Galaxy S5. He showed off the fact that the Fire Phone is better for outdoor viewing than the alternatives, and he explained that it makes reading on the phone easier, something that Amazon has an understandable interest in with its trove of digital books, because users need only tilt the phone to scroll through the pages.

But perhaps more importantly, Amazon is entering a competition for Google’s ad dollars. The bulk of Google’s business is still advertising. Even as it works on so-called “moonshot” projects like driverless cars and Google Glass, Google lives by the promise that it has the best service for tracking potential customers and showing them an ad. But Amazon just released a feature on its smartphone called Firefly, which, if truly successful, could bypass Google altogether.



by  Issie Lapowsky
read full article at Wired http://www.wired.com/2014/06/fire-phone/