Amazon is gearing up for another big move into hardware.
The company is hosting an event near its Seattle headquarters on Wednesday in which CEO Jeff Bezos will unveil a still-unknown product widely suspected to be a high-end smartphone.
A smartphone would be a first for Amazon (AMZN,Tech30), which has steered clear of the handset market in the past few years as fellow tech giants Apple (AAPL, Tech30) and Samsung (SSNLF)have swallowed it up, and companies like Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) and BlackBerry(BBRY, Tech30) have struggled.
According to industry analysts and leaks in the tech press, Amazon has been developing a smartphone with a screen that displays 3-D images without the need to wear special glasses.
"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," the Wall Street Journal reported last year, citing anonymous sources.
