Amazon developing kindle phone?

NEW YORK: A new report indicates that Amazon is working on a smart phone - possibly dubbed the 'Kindle Phone' - with a holographic display.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Amazon smart phone, like the Nintendo 3Ds would not require special glasses to use. Instead, a retina-tracker would follow the movement of the user's eyeballs, and render images on the display as "three-dimensional at all angles."

No comment was available from the Amazon officials over the issue. But it does make sense that the company would want to get into the smart-phone game. After all, the Kindle Fire line of tablets, which undercuts the more advanced Apple IPad on price, has been proved pretty successful.

The report said not everyone is thrilled about the idea. In a wonderfully contrarian post over at Wired.com blogger Roberto Baldwin details the many, many things wrong with a holographic smart phone. Among them: the technology isn't yet good enough to produce something that isn't "cheesy"; app developers would go out of their minds trying to create a bunch of stereoscopic-capable software; and privacy would go straight out the window.

"You might not want your bank statement floating above your phone," Baldwin writes. "Sure, the chances are slim that someone will be looking at your phone at the same focal angle as you while you look at your phone. But anything that pulls critical data off of a two-dimensional screen and creates a 3D image of it sounds like a bad idea. Oh look, you just got a text from your significant other and now your cube-mate knows about your love life in glorious 3D," the post added.