Given the success of Amazon’s Kindle tablets and e-readers and its acquisition of The Washington Post, the company is certainly no stranger to the digital media space. However, the online retail giant now promises that a mysterious new product will be “even bigger than Kindle” when it launches.
“We are working on a new revolutionary V1 product that will allow us to deliver Digital Media to our customers in new ways and disrupt the current marketplace,” Amazon wrote in an exclusive event invite at the end of 2013. “We believe this new product will be even bigger than Kindle!” the invite read, which was shared by Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner on Boston.com.
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The message didn’t include any concrete information on what Amazon has in the works, but previous rumors have suggested that a 3D smartphone could be in its pipeline.
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A report from October said that Amazon’s purported phone would use four separate cameras to detect its user’s eyes. The same report from TechCrunch also said that the Kindle maker is testing a type of facial recognition technology that would block out nearby faces to only detect a single user.
At the same time, reports have suggested that Amazon is delving into the set-top box space. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Amazon is currently testing the device in its Lab 126 division. The report pegged the set-top box for a fall 2013 launch, and a more recent report published by The Wall Street Journal in October also said that the device is on track for a holiday launch.
We're now well into 2014 and have seen no such product. The vague event invite published by Kirsner is also sent from Lab 126, hinting at a possible correlation.
It’s unclear exactly what Amazon has up its sleeve, but after CEO Jeff Bezos surprised us with Amazon’s Prime Air drone delivery service, set-top boxes, 3D smartphones and even wearable devices don’t seem too far off.
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