Amazon is rolling out Alexa voice services on Fire tablets via a new software update. The update is making its way to last year’s Fire HD 8, Fire HD 10, and regular Fire tablets, as well as this year’s Fire HD 8 offering. Once it makes its way to your own Fire tablet, you'll be able to use Alexa by pressing the on-screen home button. There's also support for linking your Echo and tablet together.
Amazon doesn't quite know what happens when you make tablets less than fifty bucks, but it's looking forward to finding out. That's some of the thinking behind the new Amazon Fire tablet, a $49.99 alternative to basic, budget slates without some of the more onerous compromises.
It's Christmas morning. Your child woke you up with an ear-piercing scream of excitement - Santa has come. Once your child sees the present you've wrapped in special paper - next to the Santa gifts, of course - they snatch it up. They realize it might just be socks. They open it. It's the Amazon Fire HD 6 Kids Edition. They go wild. Then it's your turn. Your task is opening the box and setting the tablet up so that they might play the whole day long. How difficult (or incredibly easy) is this going to be, you might ask?
The team behind Scribd want to make their service as accessible as possible. To do this, they've seen it necessary to expand beyond the Kindle - to move past the Amazon environment. To do this, they've decided, they'll need to open their platform to Audiobooks. According to Scribd, this $1 billion a year market is just ripe for expansion - 30,000 audiobooks are on the way to their service right this minute. This will be the single largest unlimited-access offering of e-books and audiobooks available in the world today.
It's not looking especially good at Amazon right this minute for investors. While operating loss was $25 million USD in Amazon's Q3 of 2013, this quarter (one year later), they've reported operating loss at $544 million. Net loss, on the other hand, was $41 million at this time last year and $437 million this quarter. On a more positive side, Amazon introduced several new products this quarter and increased net sales 20% to $20.58 billion this quarter compared to $17.09 billion one year ago. It may be time for a fire sale, nonetheless.
In the market for a new ereader? Amazon's hoping you'll opt for a Kindle Voyage, with the 300dpi digital book we reviewed yesterday beginning to ship to pre-order customers, alongside its new tablet siblings, the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 and the Fire HD Kids Edition. Voyage is, as we ourselves found, certainly Amazon's best E Ink Kindle to-date, but that technology also comes with a hefty price tag attached.
Amazon’s Fire Phone, set to launch next month, comes with a wide range of features that some critics are calling gimmicks. They argue that the device’s four cameras on the front that allow it to deliver a 3D-like effect and some extra Dynamic Perspective features, like tilt and swivel, makes little sense. And Firefly, they say, is little more than a way for Amazon to make more money off a given product. The truth, however, is much different.
The Amazon Fire Phone has been revealed this afternoon complete with a set of features unique to its hardware and software builds. Starting with a 4.7-inch, 1280 x 720 display with LCD technology and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor under the hood, this device aims to take on the high-end market with specifications that don’t always beat the high end.
Inside the Amazon Fire Phone you’ll find one of the killer features revealed late last year with the Kindle Fire for the holidays. That is Mayday, a live video support service that helps you with your phone when you need it.
Access to sports content of various sorts has always been a sticky subject for cord-cutters -- those who eschew traditional cable for set-top boxes and video streaming services. For NFL fans, that issue has been addressed in part by the National Football League, which today revealed that both Roku and Amazon has become distribution partners for NFL Now.
The folks at Amazon interested most in making certain they’ve got the largest cross-section of Android-based apps possible have let it be known that Pokemon TV has hit their device library. In the Amazon Appstore, users will be able to access Pokemon TV starting this week. This app will allow users to access a library of more than 700 episodes of Pokemon TV shows spanning 16 seasons.
Specifications for the Amazon Kindle Fire phone - or whatever they’ll end up calling it - have leaked. Photos of the phone have leaked as well, confirming suspicions had by several sources over the past few weeks, allowing us a peek at what may very well be a combination of elements able to give pause to iPhone users. Will you be one of them?
