Amazon is scaling back its hardware efforts

So, does anyone remember last year when Amazon attempted to release a smartphone? No? … I didn't think so. Since the Fire Phone flopped last year, costing Amazon as much as £100 million, the company has decided that it would be a wise idea to scale back its hardware efforts a bit.

Since the Fire Phone incident, Amazon has let go of several engineers who worked at the company's Lab 126, according to The Wall Street Journal. Now Lab 126 has had some internal reshuffling, combining two separate hardware divisions in to one.

Some upcoming products seemingly dropped thanks to the changes include a 14-inch tablet, a stylus known as Nitro and even a projector. It is currently unclear if these projects have been put on hold or outright cancelled. There were likely many more projects being planned but since Amazon took such a hit on its smartphone, it may not be ready to take any more risks for a while.

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KitGuru Says: Amazon's Fire Phone just wasn't a competitive device. On top of that, the Android smartphone market is already saturated enough, so breaking in to that so late must be hard. That said, Amazon has had some success with its Kindle tablets, so all hope is not lost for Amazon's hardware division. 

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