Unnamed sources from Taiwan's supply chain report that Primax Electronics has received orders from Amazon for compact camera modules (CCM) for smartphones hitting the market in the first half of 2014. These smartphones will feature floating point technology, sources claim, and each phone will be equipped with six CCMs for sensing.
This bit of detail backs up previous rumors that the Kindle smartphone will have multiple front-facing cameras that will determine where the user's face is located, and render the 3D on screen accordingly. But the mention of "floating point" technology indicates that the phone may have a motion sensing attribute, allowing the user to control the phone without having to touch the screen.
The last we heard, sources said Amazon was working with HTC on three smartphones, and that one of these devices was in an advanced stage of development and would not ship until 2014, if at all. Based on previous rumors, the phone will likely have four cameras on the front for the motion sensing/3D aspect, another camera on the front for video calling, and one on the back for taking pictures.
Prior rumors claimed that Amazon was working on two phones: one high-end model and one inexpensive model. Both phones were reportedly part of Project B, one of many "Alphabet" projects under development inside Amazon's Lab126 facility in California. Sources recently claimed that the high-end phone eventually moved to a "Duke" codename and is now using "Smith."
There's speculation that Amazon may use a version of its Fire OS 3.0 "Mojo" operating system for its phones. This platform supports enterprise-based features including a native VPN client, a native SCEP (Simple Certificate Exchange Protocol) client, and device management APIs. Therefore, the new Kindle Fire HDX tablets can be used in a BYOD environment, as could a Fire OS-based smartphone.
Unnamed sources said that Primax Electronics will supply more than 50 percent of the CCMs for Amazon's phone. Naturally, the company has declined to comment.
