Amazon has announced the addition of five new unlocked Android smartphones to its Prime Exclusive Phones lineup for the company's Prime customers. These phones all run Android, and counted among them is the newly unveiled Nokia 6 model. Why buy one of these handsets? They're steeply discounted versus what you'd pay elsewhere.
Listen to the critics, and Amazon's Echo Show represents be a honeypot of privacy intrusion and creepy surveillance. Though Alexa, the retailer's virtual assistant, isn't new, the addition of a camera to the Echo Show smart speaker gives her eyes in your home for the first time. It's the circumstances around when those eyes are open - and who can turn on that camera remotely - that is triggering privacy fears.
When the Amazon Echo launched nearly three years ago, barely anyone knew how to make heads or tails of it. Fast forward to today, even the likes of Google and Apple are seen as trying to catch up with the retail giant. Amazon stepped up its game when it announced the Echo Show, which goes on sale later this week. And to remind everyone what they're really getting when they purchase one, Amazon released some videos showing off what can be done on what is probably the closest we'll get to a real-world Star Trek LCARS.
Amazon is making Alexa a bit more sophisticated with new support for hands-free intercom functionality, enabling the various Echo devices to be used as an intercom system throughout your home. The support is available on the Echo, the smaller Echo Dot, and the display-based Echo Show, but you have to do a couple things first to get the feature up and running on your own devices.
Amazon's Echo has grown from a voice-controlled curiosity to being a legitimate home assistant, and now, with Echo Show, it's gaining a display. The latest iteration in the smart speaker series bucks the trend of spoken interactions only, adding a touchscreen so that Alexa can show & tell. At $229.99, however, it's the most expensive version so far, and at this early stage not everything has quite got to grips with the new abilities.
It's clear that Amazon wants its Echo line of devices to be the center hub of your smart home, but at $180 for the standard Amazon Echo, the buy-in can be significant. If that $180 price point is more than you want to spend on a smart home speaker, then good news: Amazon has slashed Echo's price significantly. The bad news is that this is a one-day-only sale, so you need to jump on it if you want to save some cash.
Earlier today, Logitech announced that you will soon be able to view a live feed of footage from its incoming Circle 2 camera on Amazon's new Echo Show. It turns out that the Circle 2 is just the tip of the iceberg here. Amazon plans to incorporate Echo View functionality with a lot of smart home cameras from a bunch of different companies - in fact, you might already some of these cameras up and running in your house already.
Logitech has announced that its soon-to-launch Circle 2 home security camera can now be used with the Amazon Echo Show device, enabling users to view their security video feeds on Amazon's latest IoT product. This is thanks to Logitech's newly announced support for the latest Alexa camera API on the Echo Show. Logitech Circle 2 owners will be able to take full advantage of the Echo's Alexa abilities, including using voice to pull up a camera's video feed.
Smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home are mostly verbal affairs. You talk to them and they respond by voice. Visual feedback is mostly an afterthought, an add-on, or a different device altogether. That makes it sometimes difficult to check the type of notifications you get without having these assistants blurt out potentially incriminating information. Fortunately, at least one of them does have an alternative means of calling your attention. Amazon has just given the Echo a few more light signals, distinguishing between an incoming call and an incoming message.
In its quest to get as many Prime subscribers as possible, Amazon has been packing it with more and more services. This year alone we've seen the launches for services like Prime Reload, Prime Reading, and Anime Strike, but today Amazon is going either further by launching a Prime service that is arguably bigger than any of those. Its name is Prime Wardrobe and it promises to "bring the fitting room to you."
Today Amazon confirmed that it intends to acquire grocery chain Whole Foods. This news comes just hours after Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey indicated that he would resist such a buyout. Amazon is prepared to pay a ton of money to make Whole Foods part of its portfolio, which may have had a hand in changing Mackey's mind.
For years, we've walked into retail stores only to pull out our phones and compare the prices we see to those online, generally using a website like Amazon to see if we're getting a good deal. Now that Amazon is beginning to expand into retail spaces of its own, it has to worry about those same pricing comparisons. In a fantastic bit of irony, Amazon could use a new patent to outright prevent people from comparing prices in its own stores.
