In March, Reuters reported that Amazon was developing a new smartphone. Citing four anonymous “people familiar with the matter,” the publication said that Amazon was exploring using Alexa as an operating system and developing the phone, codenamed Transformer, to push people to use Amazon’s AI and other services. At the time, the sources said that Transformer could still be canceled, and Amazon declined to comment on the report to Ars Technica.
In an interview published on the Financial Times (FT) today, Panos Panay, Amazon's head of devices and services, said building a new phone isn’t Amazon’s goal.
The company already tried selling a smartphone in 2014, but it discontinued the Fire Phone about a year later following poor sales.