Amazon is planning on significantly expanding its line of hardware devices, Greg Bensinger at the Wall Street Journal reports. 
 
 Amazon is developing two new smartphones as well as an audio streaming device, which we assume would be like an iPod. 
 
 Previously, there was a report Amazon was developing a video streaming box that rivals Apple TV and Roku. 
 
 If all of these reports are accurate, Amazon is going to have quite the suite of hardware products. 
 
 One of the two smartphones Amazon is developing will reportedly have a 3D screen that can track your eye movements. The 3D screen on this high-end smartphone would not require glasses. Images would appear to float on the screen like a hologram, says Bensinger. 
 
 You never want to pre-judge a product that doesn't exist, but this sounds really bad. It sounds like a mess of horrendous gimmicks. 
 
 There is no value in a 3D screen. HTC made a phone with a 3D screen, the EVO 3D. It didn't come out with a second 3D phone, which tells you all you need to know. 
 
 When HTC failed to follow with a second 3D phone, an HTC rep explained the decision to CNET, saying, "I wouldn't say 3D was necessarily dead, I mean never say never, but we don't have any new products with 3D in the lineup. That's based partially on customer feedback, what we know the market wants, and also a design decision we've made." 
 
 As for eye-tracking, Samsung is trying that and it's not working. Amazon has failed to produce great software, so we see little-to-no chance that its going to do good eye tracking software. 
 
 The smartphone market is very crowded. Amazon understandbly wants to roll out a smartphone that stands out from the crowd. 3D screens and eye tracking are not the best way to stand out. 
 
 If Amazon really wants to do something great with the smartphone it should focus on data plan pricing. If it could radically cut consumers' monthly cell phone bills it would have a winner. 
 
 Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions. ||||| Take a deep breath, hold on to your hat, and take a seat: Amazon is building a smartphone. 
 
 Still there? 
 
 Sorry for the big shocker. Almost a year after reports that Amazon was testing smartphones in Asia, half a year after rumors Amazon was buying a smartphone chip processor, a year after more reports that Amazon was building its own smartphone, five months after unveiling a notifications system that would look really nice on a smartphone, and six months after probably wild speculation that Amazon was going to unveil a smartphone for the pre-Christmas shopping spree in 2012, there’s yet another report that Amazon is building a smartphone. 
 
 But this one has a 3D screen. 
 
 The Wall Street Journal says that Amazon is building at least two smartphones, including a high-end model with 3D graphics and retina-tracking technology so that users can navigate content by “using just their eyes.” Plus an audio-only “streaming content device.” 
 
 Harrumph. 
 
 Amazon is almost certainly working on a smartphone and almost certainly planning to release it in 2013. There’s just too much smoke for there not to be fire. And having made its bet on digital content being the growth engine of the company’s future success — 12 of the 15 highlights in Amazon’s recent earnings release were about digital content — a smartphone that makes use of Amazon’s recently expanded app store and burgeoning virtual shelves of ebooks, TV shows, movies, and all other forms of digital content makes way too much sense. 
 
 But a couple grains of salt. 
 
 Amazon hasn’t made its bones in the tablet market by offering the absolutely latest and greatest technology but by presenting a solid product at a rock-bottom price. So I’m a little skeptical about all the wild 3D speculation — especially because that could be a sweet datapoint plant for the company to identify leak sources. And, in reality, a company the size of Amazon, like Apple, is working on many different projects at any given time. Some of them will come to market, and some of them won’t. 
 
 One company that can’t be happy about Amazon impending smartphone plans, however, has to be Google. Amazon has essentially hijacked Android for its Kindle offerings, taking the open-source mobile operating system that Google has developed, stripping out the Google app store, Google apps, and Google branding, and replacing them with its own offerings. Amazon will doubtless adopt the exact same strategy with any smartphone play — as Samsung might as well. 
 
 And, given the fact that Kindle is probably the leading Android-based tablet, it has the potential to do well in smartphones as well. 
 
 Of course, incumbent leader in Android sales Samsung might have a thing or two to say about that. 
 
 Image credit: Brian Sawyer/Flickr ||||| Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has just announced the company's first-ever smartphone, the Fire Phone, at a private event in Seattle. The device is the latest in a growing family of Amazon hardware that includes the Kindle Fire tablets and the Fire TV set-top box. The phone is exclusive to AT&T, and will cost $199 with a two-year contract for a 32GB device and $299 for a 64GB device. The phone will cost $650 off-contract, which is common for high-end smartphones. Amazon's product page indicates that it's available for pre-order now, and will begin shipping to buyers on July 25. For a "limited time," a full year of Amazon Prime membership is included with purchase. 
 
 The phone has a 4.7-inch IPS display with 590 nits maximum brightness and a 1280×720 resolution, giving it a density of 315PPI. This isn't the biggest or highest-resolution phone there is, but Amazon says it has been "optimized for one-handed use." The phone has a rubberized frame, a glass back, anodized aluminum buttons, and Gorilla Glass 3 protecting the display from scratches and other damage. The phone is 0.35 inches (8.9mm) thick and weighs 5.64 ounces (160 grams). 
 
 The phone's most-hyped capability, of course, is its motion-tracking screen—four cameras on the front of the device track your head as you move it around, along with infrared lights to make sure the feature works even in dark rooms. You can move and tilt the phone to shift the contents of the display (images, maps, and so on), subtly creating a glasses-free 3D effect that doesn't rely on the user keeping their head or eyes in a particular position. The phone will let you flip through images and scroll through Web pages by slightly tilting the device, rather than relying solely on finger input. A third-party SDK is available so that developers can add this "dynamic perspective" feature to their own apps. 
 
 On the inside, the phone is suitably high-end: it uses a quad-core 2.2GHz SoC with an Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB of RAM—according to Amazon's product page, the phone uses a Snapdragon 800. It uses a 2,400mAh battery that Amazon says will deliver up to 11 hours of video playback, and it includes 802.11ac Wi-Fi. The Fire OS 3.5.0 operating system is a newer version of the Android-derived OS that powers the Kindle Fire HDX tablets. 
 
 It's got a 13MP camera with a f/2.0, five-element lens and optical image stabilization that sounds pretty good on paper, though, of course, we'll need to get our hands on the thing before we know exactly how good its pictures are. A dedicated shutter button like the one found on Windows phones will automatically open the camera app and take pictures for you, and Bezos boasted that buyers will get free unlimited photo storage via Amazon Cloud Drive. 
 
 Amazon also paid attention to the phone's sound: it uses dual stereo speakers and includes "tangle-free" earbuds that should knot up less easily. 
 
 Though both Apple and Google have their own media ecosystems, one of Amazon's main selling points was the amount of stuff you get access to in the Amazon ecosystem. Prime customers get access to the Kindle Lending Library and Prime Instant Video, and Amazon's MP3 store and Kindle bookstore are both well-stocked. Third-party apps like Netflix and HBO Go will be available on the Fire Phone as well, expanding the amount of content accessible from outside Amazon's stores. 
 
 Bezos also demoed a new feature called " Firefly " that can identify songs being played in a room, episodes of various TV shows, and art. Firefly can recognize phone numbers, e-mail addresses, barcodes and QR codes, and other items, importing them into the phone and making it easier to contact people (and, of course, buy stuff) without needing to do a lot of extraneous typing. These images are taken by the camera, sent to Amazon's cloud, and sent back to the phone to save the phone's processor and its battery life. Amazon has created a third-party SDK that developers can use to come up with their own uses for Firefly. 
 
 Finally, the "Mayday" live tech support feature that was introduced with the Kindle Fire HDX tablets this year is coming to the phone, too, offering 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week tech support to customers who need it. 
 
 We've been hearing rumors about this phone since at least 2012, when a Bloomberg report about an Amazon phone first surfaced. Those rumors intensified earlier this year, and the buzz was that Amazon would be using multiple motion-sensing cameras and software from Omron to simulate a three-dimensional effect without using glasses or a special screen setup like Nintendo's 3DS. 
 
 Amazon's smartphone event has wrapped up. We'll have hands-on impressions of the Fire Phone up later today.
– Rumors of an Amazon smartphone have been kicking around for a while, and the Wall Street Journal weighs in today with some funky-sounding specifics. Its sources say one of the devices the company is working on has a 3D screen: "Using retina-tracking technology, images on the smartphone would seem to float above the screen like a hologram and appear three-dimensional at all angles," writes Greg Bensinger. "Users may be able to navigate through content using just their eyes." At VentureBeat, John Koetsier writes that it's a safe bet Amazon will come out with a smartphone sometime this year. But he's skeptical about this 3D business, even suggesting the nugget might have been planted as a way to identify the source of leaks. And at Business Insider, Jay Yarow writes that for Amazon's sake, it better be false. "There is no value in a 3D screen," he writes. "HTC made a phone with a 3D screen, the EVO 3D. It didn't come out with a second 3D phone, which tells you all you need to know."