The cheaper Fire tablets now can take in Alexa requests just by your asking them with your voice. Plug it in and they can even be asleep when you're poking them!
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Amazon's Fire OS 6 is (almost) here, with minimal buzz and fuss, debuting on the Fire TV Gen 3 with Android Nougat-powered functionality.
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Nobody, including e-commerce giant Amazon and its often eccentric Lab126 engineers and developers, expected the Echo smart speaker to catch on. Certainly not as fast as it did, and on such a large scale that it reportedly sold over 5 million units since 2014, prompting several low-cost spin-offs, and let’s face it, a Google-made copycat.
Without a doubt, the voice-controlled home automation hub owes much of its mainstream commercial success to the built-in Alexa personal assistant, which is now also available as standard on an all-new Fire TV Stick, select Fire tablets, and third-party TCL Xess “kitchen accessory.”
It should come as no surprise therefore that Amazon wants to further boost Alexa’s reach, especially to fend off Google Assistant and Siri’s imminent expansion, with a “premium Echo-like speaker with a screen” rumored for an announcement “as soon as the first quarter of 2017.”
Wait, isn’t an “Echo-like” speaker with a “touchscreen measuring about seven inches” basically a tablet? It sure sounds that way, particularly if it’s to run an “optimized version of Fire OS”, aka Amazon’s homebrewed Android fork.
The main difference between this upcoming screen-sporting “speaker” and current 7, 8 or 10-inch Fires will probably be the former’s support for “high-quality audio at all volume levels”, and of course, a resulting price tag significantly surpassing the standard Echo’s $180 MSRP. Sounds like a slightly harder sell, but we’re definitely intrigued.
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It’s been just over a week now since Amazon introduced the latest member of the Kindle family, launching the very thin (if somewhat oddly shaped) Kindle Oasis e-reader. For users who love the look of e-ink screens when settling in for a little light reading, the new model certainly delivered, but what about a more full-featured tablet – say, a new Fire model? Last week we also heard a rumor ...
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While owners of low-cost Fire tablets aren’t routinely characterized as extremely tech-savvy, and Amazon’s argument for ditching full disk encryption probably held up, the timing of the security-shrinking move wasn’t the wisest.Even if no one actually uses the feature, it feels weird to just give it up voluntarily, without so much as a heads up, when other companies’ execs are literally risking their freedom to protect it on every single iDevice ...
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Encryption has a certain forward momentum to it: methods for protecting files and devices tend to keep getting better and better over time, not worse. Just look at how tying encryption to things like fingerprint security has made it easier to use (and trickier to crack) or how Android full-disk encryption started out as an optional feature, only to emerge as standard on Marshmallow-powered hardware. ...
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It should be so straightforward: power comes from one place, and then a cable helps move it somewhere else. Heck, designing and building cables has been the backbone of the electronics industry going back over a century. So why does it seem so darn hard to get it right? Over the past few months, we’ve seen a surprising number of product recalls related to power cabling, as Apple, Microsoft, and
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After months and months of discounts, with Amazon trying to move any remaining stock of its failed Fire Phone experiment, last year we finally saw the handset run out of steam: the company’s inventory looked depleted, and the saga of the Fire Phone appeared to be over. No doubt a costly mistake for Amazon to learn, we wondered ...
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Have you finished your holiday shopping yet? The clock’s ticking, but you’ve still got time left, and assuming you didn’t blow your whole budget on Black Friday deals, some new gift options are only now arriving. Amazon introduced its Fire HD 8 tablet back in September, and while the 1280 x 800 screen and MediaTek SoC didn’t scream “top of the line specs,” the $150 price point sure was right. But if that model just feels a little too “plain” for gift-giving, you’re in luck, ...
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Amazon’s new fall hardware lineup has just made its debut, and we’ve already taken a look at the new Fire tablets that will bring, including the Fire HD 8, Fire HD 10, Fire Kids Edition, and the crazy budget-priced $50 Fire tablet. That all adds up to a great start, but we’re not done quite yet: Amazon’s also got some new devices for your living room, and today also reveals the new Fire TV, Fire TV Stick ...
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Tomorrow marks one year since Amazon’s last launch of new Fire tablets, so it’s only fitting that today we’re seeing the retailer follow those up with a fresh crop of new models. We just checked in with the imminently affordable $50 seven-inch Fire tablet, but that’s far from the only new addition to the Fire series of devices. In addition to that model, Amazon’s introducing the new Fire HD 8, Fire ...
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For the past couple weeks now, we’ve been seeing rumors really start heating up about Amazon’s next tablets, as sources attempted to identify not just some annual refreshes to the usual selection of Fire models, but also the introduction of a more-affordable-than-ever model in the form of a tablet slated to sell for a mere $50. Overnight we checked out
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It’s been about a year now since Amazon’s last big refresh of its Fire tablet lineup, and based on the recent rumors we’ve been hearing, we’re not too far off from the arrival of a fresh crop of devices. Early last week we checked in with a rumor that talked a little about what that lineup might look like, focusing on the debut of a super-affordable six-inch model, but also mentioning the arrival of a ...
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Amazon may have once seemed like an unlikely company to design and build tablets, but the retailer has managed to successfully spin off its Kindle e-reader into a line of Fire tablets, one that’s already spanned multiple generations. While Amazon’s share of the tablet market may have waned in recent years, the company doesn’t look like it’s out of tricks just yet, and a new report indicates that Amazon may be ramping up for an aggressive holiday season with a lineup of new Fire HD ...
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Amazon never really set out to be a company that designed and sold its own mobile hardware, but a heck of a lot has changed since its early days as an online bookstore. From the initial success of the Kindle e-reader, Amazon’s expanded its hardware offerings ranging from the affordable Fire tablets, to its Fire TV set-top box, to the ...
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