Ex-Windows Phone exec joins Amazon, may be working on smartphone

Former Windows Phone General Manager Charlie Kindel revealed that Amazon, the company that sells the Kindle, brought him onboard today, which sounded like yet another April Fools' prank.

However, the only April 1-related joke was that he and the company were making a home server product called the "Amazon Kindle Charlie."

The home server is fictitious, but the experience that Kindel can bring to the online retailer is not.

At Microsoft, he was the driving force behind Windows Home Server and the Windows Phone 7 application platform and developer experience.

"Depending on your perspective you can either blame me or thank me for a large part of ActiveX," Kindel lightheartedly stated on his Google+ profile.

'Something secret' at Amazon

Although Kindel was in the joking mood about his move to Amazon, he was serious about keeping his future plans at the company top-secret.

"I'm building a new team going after a totally new area for Amazon. I'm hiring cloud and mobile developers and testers, program managers, and product managers," he wrote on his LinkedIn profile, according to GeekWire.

He described the role as the director of "something secret."

Amazon Kindle phone in 2013?

That "something secret" could be the long-rumored Amazon smartphone, which has been reportedly delayed until later this year.

This theory is backed up by Kindel's strong Windows Phone experience and the fact that his new job will focus on something new with "ginormous potential."

"Amazon presented an opportunity to build something new that has ginormous potential. I simply couldn't pass the opportunity up," he said.

"As a double bonus, the idea that I can work in such a principled and customer focused company is really exciting to me."

For now, the only other information Kindel is revealing about his day-to-day duties at the company came from a follow-up tweet.

"First task of Amazon new hire training: Remove laptop stickers," he wrote on Twitter, followed by a photo of a half-peeled Windows computer sticker belonging to none other than his former employer.