Google hires Amazon’s David Foster to design its next smartphones

Google has hired Amazon’s former hardware chief, David Foster, as its vice president of product engineering. Foster will be leading Google’s next line of smartphones that are to debut today in San Fransisco, according to The Information, adding his fingerprints to future devices.

Google just hired a key Amazon Lab 126 hardware guy to lead development of the Pixel phones you’ll see tomorrow. https://t.co/ohmQ9qi8VA

— Amir Efrati (@amir) October 4, 2016

Foster previously helped Amazon as Kindle hardware chief to build gadgets like Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Voyage, as well as the Echo and Dash as part of the company’s Lab126 products. He worked at Apple from 1998 to 2004 as a Senior Director, served a year at Gibson Guitar as CTO, and moved onto Microsoft to manage hardware development.

With this move from Google, it isn’t unclear that the internet giant is driving huge focus on its hardware division. It will be interesting to see how “Made by Google” hardwares do in real world.