There’s still a lot of pieces missing in the tale of Amazon’s smartphone, but one big way the company could set themselves apart from the pack would be to leverage AT&T’s Sponsored Data service with their Prime subscription service to create a cheaper monthly phone bill.

Amazon has apparently been working on a smartphone behind the scenes for a couple of years now, but there’s never been any real chatter about it until recently. What we think we know now is that Amazon will launch a phone later this year with some unique camera and 3D tech in order to create a wildly new experience on top of their version of Android.
Whether or not Amazon’s AppStore is capable of holding its own against the Google Play Store and iOS in the smartphone world is debatable, but if Amazon heads toward their own hardware there’s a good chance they will be marginally successful.
The one big way that they could give themselves an advantage is to approach the mobile experience from a new angle, by approaching the smartphone as though they are aware that you spend a monthly sum on data and trying to help out with that. According to BGR, who broke the Amazon story in the first place, the Amazon phone could wind up being an AT&T exclusive by way of their Sponsored Data program.
This service allows Amazon to foot the bill for certain amounts of data that you would use every month. In essence, they could do anything from making all of your time on Amazon services cost you nothing in data, to making it so your monthly bill is significantly cheaper than it should be.
For Amazon users who are fans of the Prime services, especially the Instant Video streaming service, this could be a huge deal. To be able to offer a solution where streaming Instant Video was not only included with your phone, but essentially free against your monthly data allotment would be incredibly powerful leverage.
We’ve still got no real idea when this phone is coming to market or what it will actually look like when we go to use it, but every time we hear more about it there’s another reason to be cautiously optimistic about its existence.