Hey, Amazon, Your New Kindle Phone Must Include These 11 Key Features

An Amazon Kindle Phone seems inevitable at this point, judging from recent reports by Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. But what features must an Amazon phone include to really thrive? Wired details the 11 killer features that would push a Kindle phone to success.
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Amazon's recent mapping-app acquisition is just one of the features needed to make it big in the smartphone world.Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Reports of an imminent Amazon smartphone are piling up so quickly, it would seem the new device is all but inevitable. Last Friday, Bloomberg reported that Amazon was readying a smartphone to live beside its already successful Kindle Fire tablet, and on Wednesday the Wall Street Journal reported that the handset is already being tested, suggesting actual prototypes exist.

According to sources within Amazon's Asian hardware partners, the Journal reported the phone could head into production later this year or early next year. And if the Kindle Fire is to serve as a reliable example, then an Amazon handset should be immediately competitive in the larger smartphone ecosystem -- just look at how quickly the Fire overwhelmed the Android tablet market.

Thanks to the power of its own homepage promotions and sheer consumer reach, Amazon shouldn't have any trouble evangelizing its next foray into mobile hardware. But it takes much more than a few homepage ads to sell an unproven smartphone line -- especially when so many people own smartphones already. Just ask Microsoft.

The upshot is that Amazon needs to whomp consumers over the head with an unprecedented line-up of new, novel features. Companies can no longer play catch-up in the mobile market, so to succeed in smartphones, Amazon needs to capture the hearts, minds and bank accounts of potential consumers.

Interested to know more, Amazon? Here are a few ideas that could put your "Kindle Phone" on top.

Unlock and Subsidize Like No One Has Ever Done Before

As smartphone consumers, we're all accustomed to subsidized handsets from carriers. To save money on hardware, we agree to stick with a carrier for two years regardless of how horrible its service may be. In exchange, we get the coolest, latest mobile phone at a discount. It's a tradeoff most of us make.

But Amazon can wield its unique power to diminish the role of carriers -- it could both unlock its phone (freeing consumers from two-year contracts) as well as subsidize the price of the phone to a level that piques real consumer curiosity. Because the Kindle Phone would function as a money-making portal into Amazon's retail experience, the company could subsidize the device on its own, effectively selling it at cost, and reaping rich rewards on the backend of physical and digital commerce.

So that's the plan, Amazon: Throw a dual GSM/CDMA radio into the phone, unlock it, sell it directly from Amazon.com, and let consumers choose their own carrier terms.

Don't Skimp on a Killer E-Book Display

Its subsidized price tag notwithstanding, the phone still needs a killer, high-resolution display. The Kindle Phone, after all, will be celebrated as the ultimate pocket-friendly mobile device for watching movies and reading e-books, so it needs a Retina-quality display that competes with what we see on, say, the iPhone 4S or HTC One X.

If a consumer can see a pixel, you've failed, Amazon. But we know you can pull this off. The display industry is realizing efficiencies of scale in the ultra-high-resolution space, and prices should be low enough once your phone needs to ship.

Give Us Sliding Video Charges

Amazon has so much clout as a retailer, it's in a unique position to rewrite the rules of how consumers pay for streaming video. The company already offers an extensive library of free videos for people who subscribe to its Prime service, and that's great. But for video rentals that still incur a cost, why not reduce prices when people stream directly to their smartphones? After all, the experience of watching a movie on a 46-inch HDTV is much more premium than watching that same movie on a 4-inch handset.

Yes, it's the same movie. And, yes, both movies would stream at HD resolution. But the core experiences are different, and your pricing should reflect that, Amazon. Especially if you want a lot of people to buy videos directly off of their Kindle Phones.

So let's pay $4 for the best Instant Video titles on computers and set-top boxes, but $2 when streaming on smartphones. And let's extend this same deal to the Kindle Fire, as well. You might initially balk, Amazon, but once you see all the people renting movies from your phones, you'll be glad you went with a sliding scale.

Ad-Driven Data Subsidization

Amazon's e-readers can be purchased for less if you agree to lock-screen ads.

Image: Amazon

Let's keep the consumer-friendly deals moving forward with something akin to what Amazon already does with its Kindle e-reader line: lock screen ads. Yes, we said it. And we're sure some of our Wired readers just released spit-takes. But we can't diminish the value of lock-screen ads.

Currently, Amazon offers Kindle e-reader price reductions of up to $50 for consumers who opt in to lock-screen ads. In effect, suffering through a few advertisements subsidizes your hardware costs. But for the Kindle Phone, we're not looking for hardware subsidies -- we're looking for data subsidies.

Amazon already has a sweetheart data deal with AT&T to bring free, unlimited data to its e-reader. Of course, e-books don't demand much bandwidth, and we wouldn't expect the same deal for a data-hogging smartphone, but Amazon is still well-positioned to negotiate cheaper data plans for consumers willing to look at ads. Perhaps a consumer opts into lock-screen ads, and receives a $10 to $15 discount on his or her data plan.

Free (Or at Least Discounted) Prime Membership

Amazon Prime is an amazing value for consumers, and translates into quite a few impulse buys. For $80 a year, an Amazon Prime member can get free, two-day shipping on select items, access to free streaming movies and TV shows, and one free book to borrow each month from Kindle's lending library. For people who regularly purchase physical items from Amazon, the free shipping alone is quite a deal.

Amazon already provides one free month of Prime service for Kindle Fire customers, but for Kindle Phone buyers, the deal should be sweetened further -- maybe three months of free Prime service, or a $40 annual membership. Why the special treatment, you ask? Because we carry our phones everywhere -- and thus we'll be making our impulse buys with increasing frequency, further goosing Amazon's sales.

Think about it, Amazon: Smartphones aren't tablets. We bring our smartphones everywhere -- and this means taking them into stores, where we'll be running price checks in the aisles and buying directly from Amazon at a discount. It's called "showrooming," and it's an even sweeter deal when you offer us free shipping via Amazon Prime.

NFC

Sometimes you can't wait for two-day shipping. Sometimes you need to purchase an item in the store, right away, in real-time. This is where Amazon can make great strides in NFC technology via its Kindle Phone.

The company already runs a service called AmazonLocal in which it partners with retailers to bring consumers daily deals on products and services. So why not create an ecosystem that gives consumers the ability to find and purchase these in-store items directly on their phones? Equipped with an NFC chip, the Kindle Phone could be used to either purchase a local deal or redeem a pre-purchased savings. And the Near Field Communication party doesn't have to stop there.

Amazon could be the company that finally pushes NFC into the mainstream. Amazon already has our credit card information, so why not use the phone to make purchases at all NFC-enabled retailers? Just swipe your Kindle Phone at check-out, and your charges will appear on your Amazon account. Unlike Google Wallet or the yet-to-be-released Isis partnership, Amazon would deal directly with the credit card companies, which it already has relationships with.

Find My Kindle Phone

Of course, if the Kindle Phone has all this purchasing power, losing it could lead to nervous breakdowns among serial shoppers. This is where Amazon takes a page out of the Apple playbook. Currently, various paid apps provide the Kindle Fire with "Find My iPhone"-type features, but Amazon needs to make this function free, and part of the OS.

Like the iPhone, the Kindle Phone should offer up a tracking feature when consumers first set up their devices. Either pay a patent licensing fee, buy a company that owns tracking technology, or just create your own system, Amazon. The value of the Kindle Phone -- and the information that consumers put on those devices -- shouldn't be underestimated.

Go Big With Your 3-D Map App

The finding-my-lost-phone feature would also showcase Amazon's recent acquisition of UpNext, a 3D mapping startup. Google and Apple made great efforts during their recent mobile OS keynotes to showcase their 3D mapping applications -- and now 3D mapping with turn-by-turn navigation is the new killer feature for smartphones.

Amazon already has the 3D mapping experience thanks to its recent acquisition, so now it needs to partner with a turn-by-turn mapping service like Apple did with Tom Tom. Find a partner and make it happen, Amazon.

Give Your OS Some TLC

Image: Jon Snyder/Wired

Let's accept on face value that the Kindle Phone will run a forked version of Android, just like the Kindle Fire. This presents a great opportunity for Amazon to give its heavily tweaked version of Android some real attention -- and fix some problems. Performance must improve interface-wide, across the board. The Silk browser must run as advertised -- that is, smooth as silk, and not painfully slow as it does today. Ditch the home screen carousel, because it won't scale well to a smaller smartphone.

Amazon, you've had seven months since the release of the Kindle Fire to learn how users are interacting with their devices. Take all this knowledge, mesh it with a killer smartphone vision, and give us a forked version of Android that doesn't make everyone call the system a forked version of Android.

Give Us Location-Aware Notifications

Some UI elements from Android are best left untouched. To this end, the Kindle Phone should either include Google Now location notifications, or Amazon should give us a custom feature that provides the same functionality. But this is really where Amazon could save itself a ton of trouble and work: By weaving in Google's location-based notification service, it could take advantage of Jelly Bean's killer feature, while tweaking it to include AmazonLocal deals.

Android's Google Now cards feature a wealth of location-based information. So unless Amazon can truly improve upon Google Now, it should embrace the feature wholesale and tweak it to look at home in the Amazon design language. Consumers get a great feature, and Amazon receives a template for adding its Groupon-like local deals service.

Go Big in Social

Integrate all the social networks, Amazon. Just do it, and don't look back. OK, maybe forget about Orkut, but make sure to include Google+, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and even Instagram. They should all receive OS-level integration. Linkedin and Google+ might not get the traffic of Facebook and Twitter, but that doesn't mean they should be ignored.

Add them all, and make it easy for consumers to share their photos and random thoughts with as many people as possible. And maybe some of those shares will be items people purchased from Amazon too.

So that's it: Wired's Kindle Phone wish list -- or Amazon's Kindle Phone to-do list, depending on how you look at it. Amazon is in a unique position to build a handset that serves consumer needs and its own business needs in one mutually beneficial fell swoop. Everyone wins.

Now Amazon just needs to announce the damn phone. Have we forgotten any key features? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.