The original Fire Phone, launched in 2014 at $649, did not gain traction. Its features, including a 3D “Dynamic Perspective” display and a camera-based shopping tool called Firefly, failed to attract users.

Limited app availability on its proprietary Fire OS made matters worse. Amazon eventually cut the price to $159, discontinued the device after 14 months, and recorded a $170 million writedown for unsold inventory.

Per Reuters, the new phone, internally known as “Transformer,” is being built by Amazon’s devices unit. The project is led by ZeroOne, a group created last year to produce “breakthrough” gadgets.

ZeroOne is headed by J Allard, a former Microsoft executive involved in the Zune and Xbox. Panos Panay, head of Amazon’s devices and services unit, has been overseeing the company’s focus on toward more profitable hardware, including upcoming Android-based tablets.

Sources familiar with the project say the Transformer could serve as a personalised device connected to Amazon’s services. It may integrate Alexa and allow seamless access to Prime Video, Prime Music, and food delivery partners.

The phone is still in development. Amazon has considered both a full-featured smartphone and a “dumbphone” with limited functions to reduce screen time.

This comes as the global smartphone market faces several challenges. International Data Corporation expects shipments to fall sharply in 2026, with surging memory chip prices driving up costs.

Apple and Samsung are still leading, controlling roughly 40% of global sales last year. Analysts say new entrants will find it difficult to take market share.

The Transformer also joins a crowded field of AI-native devices. Previous attempts, such as the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1, embedded AI directly into hardware but failed after poor reviews and limited adoption.

OpenAI, meanwhile, is working with former Apple design chief Jony Ive on AI hardware prototypes expected no earlier than 2026.

Colin Sebastian, an analyst at R.W. Baird, said, “Amazon will have to give consumers a compelling reason to switch phones and people are pretty attached to the existing app stores.”

Amazon has not disclosed pricing or release plans for the Transformer. A company spokesperson declined to comment.

The rollout, which is currently open to Alexa+ Early Access participants across all subscription plans, enhances how the company wants people to discover and interact with music.

Unlike the traditional Alexa that responded to straightforward commands, Alexa+ brings a more conversational and intelligent approach. 

It’s built to talk with users like a knowledgeable music companion, someone who not only takes requests but also understands curiosity. With Alexa+, users can dig into the details of songs, artists, or even eras of music. 

You can ask who influenced a particular artist, what a song means, or find that elusive track you only remember from a movie scene.

Amazon said it’s already seeing strong engagement from users testing the feature. Listeners who used Alexa+ explored three times more songs than those using the old version, and users asking for recommendations listened to nearly 70% more music. 

Those numbers show that people are no longer just pressing play; they’re conversing with their music app.

The feature’s conversational depth is what sets it apart. A user might say, “Play pop songs from the ’90s including Madonna, but skip the boy bands,” or “Make a playlist of 2010s hits that keep me moving fast, starting with a track from Nicki Minaj.” 

Alexa+ then builds dynamic playlists based on tone, tempo, and personal taste. You can even request something as niche as, “Create a music playlist that sounds like a Parisian café and only include songs in French.”

Beyond playlist creation, Alexa+ acts as a musical researcher in your pocket. It can explain the story behind lyrics, trace the origins of samples, or connect artists by genre or geography. 

Asking, “What’s the story behind the lyrics to Hotel California?” or “Recommend some artists from the London punk scene in the ’70s” now leads to detailed, conversational responses rather than robotic answers.

Spotify recently integrated similar conversational features, and Amazon’s move places Alexa+ as a competitor capable of deep engagement and contextual understanding.

The rollout also reveals Amazon’s larger investment in embedding intelligent systems across its ecosystem. Earlier this year, Alexa+ was unveiled as part of Amazon’s broader plan to bring “agent-level” assistance to everyday use, handling not just music, but tasks such as restaurant bookings and grocery orders.

For now, the new feature remains limited to early access users, but a wider release is expected soon. To try it, Amazon Music users can simply update their app, tap the “a” button in the lower right corner, and start talking.

Amazon says, “Alexa+ transforms the way we discover music by offering a more intuitive, conversation-based approach, turning what used to be a basic search function into an interactive discussion guided by your own curiosity.”

The outage, which originated from AWS’s US-EAST-1 region, began in the early hours of Monday and quickly spread beyond the United States, affecting Europe, Asia, and Africa. 

According to AWS’s own status dashboard, multiple services are currently “impacted” due to “increased error rates and latencies,” with engineers “actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause.”

For users, the impact has been immediate and widespread. Alexa devices have gone silent, unable to respond to voice commands or execute daily routines like alarms and reminders. 

Developers and businesses using AWS’s cloud network, from Airtable to Perplexity AI and the McDonald’s app, have also been hit. Even high-traffic entertainment platforms like Fortnite, Roblox, and Rainbow Six Siege are offline.

Downdetector, a platform that tracks service disruptions, has logged over 2,000 incident reports in the U.S. alone since the outage began. On Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), frustrated users across time zones have shared screenshots of failed connections and frozen dashboards.

“Perplexity is down right now,” confirmed Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, in a post on X. “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”

Amazon, in its latest public update at 3:51 a.m. ET, noted that it would provide further information every 45 minutes “or sooner if we have additional information to share.” However, at the time of writing, there is still no estimated timeline for full restoration.

This isn’t the first time AWS’s US-EAST-1 region has been the source of widespread disruption. Similar outages in December 2021, November 2020, and June 2023 took down high-profile platforms including Netflix, Disney+, Slack, Zoom, and Twitch. 

Each incident revealed an issue across the tech industry, that a large portion of the global internet depends heavily on a single cloud provider’s regional infrastructure.

The current outage appears to have hit both consumer-facing apps and backend systems, including AWS’s own Support Center and Support API, which organisations rely on for case creation and troubleshooting.

While AWS has reiterated that engineers are investigating the problem, the lack of transparency about the specific cause of the outage is driving industry-wide anxiety. Many are now revisiting familiar cases of how much centralisation is too much when the internet’s backbone depends on just a handful of companies.

For now, millions of users are in a holding pattern, waiting, refreshing, and hoping their devices come back online soon.

The company has scheduled an event on February 26 in New York, where Panos Panay, head of Amazon’s devices and services team, will provide a preview of the upgrade.

The new iteration of Alexa is an anticipated development since the product’s debut over a decade ago. Designed to engage in extended conversations and take actions on behalf of users, this upgrade could transform Alexa into a more interactive and intelligent assistant. 

Currently, Alexa responds to individual commands, but the upcoming version is expected to handle multiple prompts in a sequence, bringing a more fluid and responsive experience.

A key internal meeting, known as a “Go/No-go” session, has been set for February 14, where executives will assess whether the product is ready for public release. If approved, Amazon will first roll out the service to a limited number of users for free, although the company has considered introducing a subscription fee ranging from $5 to $10 per month in the future. 

Meanwhile, the existing version, now referred to as “Classic Alexa,” will remain available at no cost, though Amazon has reportedly halted the addition of new features to it.

Despite Alexa’s initial success in driving wide adoption of voice assistants, its functionality has been largely unchanged in recent years. Many users now primarily rely on it for basic tasks like setting timers or checking the weather. 

The latest upgrade aims to revitalise the product by integrating AI technology that can understand user preferences, refine recommendations, and assist with various tasks, such as modifying food orders before they are finalised.

Amazon has had some delays in bringing this advanced version to market due to issues with response accuracy and speed. Internally, the project has been codenamed “Banyan” and “Remarkable Alexa”, although it is unclear whether either will be used as the official name upon release.

The new Alexa will be compatible with existing Alexa-enabled devices, which number over 500 million worldwide. It is expected to be powered, at least in part, by AI technology from Anthropic, a startup in which Amazon has invested $8 billion.

In a January interview with the Financial Times, Amazon executive Rohit Prasad acknowledged the challenges in developing the updated assistant, particularly in minimising inaccuracies, commonly known as “hallucinations,” which have been an issue for many AI-powered chatbots.

According to estimates from Bank of America, if just 10% of Alexa’s active users—estimated at around 100 million devices—subscribe to the premium service at $5 per month, Amazon could generate an additional $600 million annually.

Alexa was originally envisioned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as a futuristic, voice-controlled assistant similar to those seen in science fiction. The company hopes that the latest enhancements will finally bring it closer to that vision, making Alexa an indispensable tool for everyday life.