Amazon is building an Alexa-based smartphone 10 years after the Fire Phone flop

Amazon is developing a new smartphone, more than ten years after it shut down the failed Fire Phone. This time the device is built around the Alexa voice AI assistant, although Alexa will not become a standalone operating system.

According to Reuters, the project is codenamed Transformer and runs inside an Amazon division called ZeroOne. The team is led by J Allard, a Microsoft veteran who helped create the Xbox and the Zune player. Allard's name in the industry is tied to products that rethought their categories, which helps explain the unconventional approach to the new device.

The team is studying two concepts at once. The first is a classic smartphone with expanded Alexa capabilities. The second is a so-called "dumbphone" in the spirit of the minimalist Light Phone, which costs 700 dollars: a black-and-white screen, a minimum of apps and a maximum of voice control. This reflects a broader debate in the industry about whether it is time to rethink the form of the personal device in the age of AI.

The Fire Phone launched in 2014 and was pulled from sale in less than a year because of its high price, weak ecosystem and the lack of a clear answer to the question "why?". Amazon wrote off losses of almost 170 million dollars. Since then the company has focused on Echo smart speakers and the smart home, turning Alexa into one of the most widely used voice assistants in the world.

Returning to the smartphone makes sense in the context of the AI device race. After the success of the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin, however mixed it was, the big players are looking for the next hardware form factor for AI assistants. With millions of Alexa users and the developed Prime infrastructure, Amazon has an advantage the startups did not have.

Transformer is still in development, and no release date has been given. But the very existence of the project suggests that Amazon does not intend to cede the mobile point of contact with users to competitors, especially as Apple integrates Apple Intelligence into the iPhone and Google pushes Gemini in Android.