When Amazon released the Fire Phone, many tech analysts agree that the e-commerce giant's take on the smartphone market is doomed to fail. Recently, Amazon finally pulled the final plug on the Fire Phone and all its existing related projects.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Amazon fired a engineers working on the secretive Lab126 division. The report added that this is the first time in the lab's 11-year history to lay off some of its employees. The exact number of laid off employees were not known and analysts are not expecting that the information will be publicize since Amazon is known to give severance pay in exchange of signing a non-disclosure agreement.
The publication also reported that Amazon is also closing some of its interesting projects which include a 14-inch tablet, a smart stylus called Nitro and a projector dubbed Shimmer.
Despite the recent closure of some of its project, it looks like Amazon is still pushing the project dubbed Kabinet, according to Techno Buffalo. A voice activated device that assist users in ordering products. Many analysts likened the device to the Amazon Echo.
When the Fire Phone was released, it boasts a 4.7-inch display screen with 720x1280 HD resolution. The phone's Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset has a quad-core 2.2 GHz Krait processor and an Adreno 330 graphics processing unit. Two models were released, 32GB and 64GB, both sporting 2GB of internal memory.
The 32GB Amazon Fire Phone was released exclusively on AT&T for $199 that comes with a two-year contract. The 64GB model of the device can be purchased off contract for $650.