Jeff Bezos promises more Amazon smartphones despite Fire Phone flameout

Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos has said the online retail giant will continue making new smartphones, despite the company booking $US170 million ($204 million) in writedowns on its Fire Phone.

According to ReCode, Bezos said: “I have made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com … literally. You might remember Pets.com or Kozmo.”

“None of those things are fun. They also don’t matter. Companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, eventually get [desperate and] make a Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence.”

In June, Amazon announced the release of the Fire Phone, with key features including Dynamic Perspective (a 3D spatial-awareness feature) and Firefly image recognition.

The release followed years of rumours the company’s Lab 126 R&D facility working on a smartphone, with the company hinting at the release before its release with claims its app store delivered the best developer returns in the industry.

While the device ran a modified version of Android, it used Amazon’s own Kindle App store rather than Google Play and did not have access to Google’s smartphone apps, leading to poor sales.

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