It's a match made in heaven and yet it took this long to happen. Alexa has already been taking orders requests on Echo and Fire devices to play your favorite music or discover new ones. The one place it has remained absent from was on your smartphone. Not anymore. Amazon has finally announced that the Amazon Music app on Android and iOS now has Alexa integration so you can say instead of type the music you want it to play.
Earlier this month a new partnership between Amazon and Kohl's was announced, with the brick-and-mortar retailer starting to sell the online giant's branded hardware, like the Echo speakers, in dedicated areas called the Amazon Smart Home Experience. It looks like that deal is already expanding, as Kohl's has revealed that it will begin accepting return orders from Amazon customers for free.
Roku got a jump on the budget smart TV market, but Amazon's own platform is ready to battle for top spot. The company first introduced its media box product in the form of the Fire TV and then the Fire Stick, and now that same system has been built into select televisions to bring the same features (and more!) without the actual dongle or box. Chief among these televisions is Westinghouse's new 4K lineup.
Amazon has gradually been entering the food market for several years now, with Amazon Fresh grocery delivery, and more recently acquiring Whole Foods. But its next expansion may include home delivery from one of your favorite restaurants. The company has announced it's partnering with Olo, a platform that handles online restaurant orders, to help improve its existing Amazon Restaurants service.
Despite having coffers as large as Google, more or less, Amazon is less trigger-happy when it comes to hardware not directly related to its core business of selling people stuff. Especially after it got burned so hard by the Fire Phone, pun totally intended. Its success with its Echo line of speakers, however, may have emboldened Amazon to make a leap of faith again, this time by putting its Alexa assistant on your face, via its own spin on the smart glasses wearable.
Hilton has announced that its rewards members can now use the points they get from stays at hotel properties to buy stuff on Amazon. This is made possible under the newly announced Shop with Points at Amazon option, giving customers a different way to redeem their Hilton Honors points. The new redemption option is available to all Hilton Honors members.
The tablet segment may have stalled, but Amazon believes there's still room for an impressively potent, surprisingly affordable Android model. Welcome, then, the Amazon Fire HD 10, the newest update of its 10.1-inch slate, with a 1080p Full HD display and quad-core 1.8 GHz processor. The headline specs might be speed, but the price is just $149.99.
Amazon may have stopped selling its Fire TV set-top box, but it hasn’t stopped supporting it. At least not yet. In fact, merely hours after said halt of sales, Amazon is reported to be rolling out an update to its range of Fire TV devices, including the Fire TV Stick, with an important new feature: keyboard voice input. This could very well be paving the road for the new 4K devices that will come with Alexa integration out of the box.
Days after a big leak revealed alleged upcoming versions of the Fire TV set-top-box, Amazon has stopped selling the current Fire TV device through its website. Though refurbished and third-party units are still available to purchase, Amazon has new units of the existing model listed as 'Currently unavailable' with no details about why.
It appears that Amazon has two new Fire TV devices on deck for 2017. While one of these is a mid-range box, the other seems poised to become Amazon's flagship Fire TV model. Unsurprisingly, this new top-of-the-line Fire TV will come equipped with Alexa - a move most of us have been expecting for quite some time.
Amazon is easily one of the world's biggest online retailers, which makes them a rival to pretty much any kind of brick-and-mortar store. That's what makes a partnership between Kohl’s and Amazon an interesting one. The two have revealed that the big box retailer will start to sell Amazon's own branded hardware inside their stores, while Google also announced that Home Depot has partnered with their Google Assistant and Google Express services.
Amazon just made a huge announcement that's going to have very exciting implications for one lucky North American city. The company revealed today that it's searching for a spot to build a second headquarters. This won't be some kind of satellite office, but rather one that Amazon says will be equal in size and importance to its current headquarters in Seattle.
