Amazon's Smartphone Could Have a Phablet-Sized Screen

Rumors of Amazon building its own smartphone just refuse to die down. We hope you like large-screened smartphones because a new report states that Amazon's already begun testing a smartphone of epic proportions.

Whether you're in the Apple or the Android/Windows Phone camp, smartphones with large displays capable of high definition resolutions are here to stay.

What with all the success that Samsung's 5.3-inch Galaxy Note has seen since its debut, it's no wonder that large smartphones are quickly becoming acceptable for everyday use without any burden of embarrassment in public.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon is testing a smartphone that is between four and five inches.

A five-inch Amazon smartphone would effectively put it in "phablet" (phone tablet hybrid) territory. Take that report with a grain of salt as screen size can change during any phase of internal testing.

Would a phablet-sized Amazon smartphone be a bad thing? Not really. So long as the phone is thin, light, solidly built and priced aggressively, it will likely do alright, just as the Kindle Fire has (that is until now).

Further anecdotal "evidence" that Amazon is beefing up its ecosystem for the arrival of a smartphone can be surmised from the company's launch of GameCircle — its leaderboard and achievements rival to Apple's Game Center or other services such as OpenFeint. Now why would Amazon launch a gaming leaderboard service if all it's got is a Kindle Fire tablet?

Either way, we're predicting an Amazon smartphone will run on some version of either Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or 4.1 Jellybean and be built to be a vending machine to sell Amazon's multitude of digital content.

Via Wall Street Journal

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