Amazon's EYE-OF-SAURON KindlePhone will watch you with FOUR cameras - report Amazon's long slog to developing its own smartphone will bear fruit with the launch of two new models in 2014, the details of which appear to have been revealed in an unverified post by an "insider" on HN heard all over the tech world. All the project has yielded so far are some wildly improbable net rumours that need to be …
Four Camera to track your movements? Why?
It can only be for it to report to the mothership (Amazon) what you are looking at so that you get new and improved shopping suggestions from Amazon?
What part of No, I do not want this crap do companies like Amazon, Google and the rest understand?
Advertisers and the people who dream up shite like this have leapfrogged above bankers tou just below lawyers who remain at No 1 in my list of professions I hate.
"Given their bloody awful tablets I'd hate to use one of their phones."
After I rooted, disabled all the Amazon snooping, advertising, autoupdating and useless background services nonsense, my Kindle fire hd is actually a joy to use for the price i paid. Great batterylife,good screen and very good sound, in fact the dolby sound the thing outputs through its speakers is far and away the best iv heard coming from any tablet.
The interface is a bit clunky, but you can install other launchers with a bit of fiddling or just flash cyanogen via a second bootloader and have done with it.
What interface? It's got a home screen where you swipe to scroll through icons, a favorites screen, and a back button and menu button anywhere you go. And you can swipe down to pull down notifications and settings from any screen. That's five simple things to deal with - all with one finger - Are you some kind of freaking idiot that can't figure that out?
I'll say it again Reg - you are getting no value whatsoever from these useless AC posts. This moron obviously hasn't ever seen a Kindle Fire, or even a picture of one. Probably a paid shill from MS coming on here to troll Android and iOS simultaneously.
No AC here and I'm happy to trash the thing as an owner.
I have a Kindle Fire, my 80 year old Mother bought one thinking it would be easy to use, so I bought her a Kindle Paperwhite (which is actually what she wanted) and took the KF on thinking it would be a good tablet if made by Amazon.
They are supposed to be sold at cost or close to it???? Video playback is fair but nothing to get excited about. They have no GPS, no Bluetooth (which is absolutely criminal), they are locked to Amazon's ecosystem so you can't use apps you've already bought in Play and have to buy them all over again if you want to use them on the Fire, and it has a paltry 6Gb of non-expandable storage (because it wants you to use their cloud services). I rooted it and managed to crowbar Play on it, but it's barely compatible with any of the apps because Amazon have forked the OS so much it's not recognisable to many apps as a "version" they are compatible with.
I could have bought a generic tablet with GPS, Bluetooth and a host of other goodies on it for a lot less and had an up to date version of android. If they are truly selling the Fire at cost or close to it then somone in their supply chain is ripping them a new one for some part or another.
" I rooted it and managed to crowbar Play on it, but it's barely compatible with any of the apps because Amazon have forked the OS so much it's not recognisable to many apps as a "version" they are compatible with."
My kindle fire hd has no problems with the play store. True, it did need `crowbarring` onto it, but its worked perfectly ever since. Only app iv come across that dosnt work is the old google talk apk sideloaded, hangouts does though.
I could just flash cm onto it, but its fine as it is for my usage, no problems whatsoever.
Only thing lacking is gps, which is strange considering the soc supports gps, maybe it can be enabled with a patch or a bit of soldering. Bluetooth gps works fine for the very rare occasion when i need it.
As citizens of our wonderful free consumerist society we should welcome the data gathering that the kindly folk at companies like Amazon, Google and Farcebook do, it helps us to make wise decisions on our purchases to improve the quality of our consumerist lives.
In addition, through the considerate back doors in their data stores these companies thoughtfully provide for our governments, we can be assured that odd behaviour or purchasing practices from certain aberrant individuals will be caught early enabling the authorities to remove these individuals and maintain a safe cleansed environment for us all.
"EYE-OF-SAURON" Really? Are you serious? I thought the Reg had standards for such things, as in the 20 Sep 2007 headline "Eye-O-Sauron™ spy towers still buggy". Or was "O" rather than "of" something that only applied in 2007, or perhaps only to US border spy towers? Mmmm?
Please get a stylistic grip people! It's far too long till beer o'clock tomorrow, and I get edgy when you cause ripples in The Natural Order Of Things this far into the week, and you wouldn't want us all getting edgy, would you...
That settled; are Amazon in competition with Zuck and the NSA for some covert creepy award?
Never mind Amazon, I want a Tesco phone, if the Hudl is anything to go by - reasonable specs, low price, close to vanilla Android, and (unlike the Nexus) a microSD slot. With their brand recognition and media coverage they'll get in the UK, a lot of stores to sell it in, and they have their own mobile network (albeit using another carrier), it could do quite well in the UK...
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