Amazon

Amazon unveils new Echo speaker, 4K Fire TV, and other hardware

Cody Lee ∙ Updated January 28, 2019

At a special event on Wednesday, Amazon unveiled a slew of new hardware featuring its Alexa voice assistant. The products include a new Echo speaker, with a more refined design and cheaper price tag, a new 4K Fire TV with HDR support, and an all-new Echo Spot device. We'll break them down for you below.

Echo 2

The new Echo looks like a smaller version of its predecessor, with a refreshed design that resembles that of Google Home and Apple's HomePod speaker. It does everything the first generation model did—connects to Alexa to play music, make calls, set alarms, control smart home devices, answer questions and much more—plus it has a dedicated bass speaker, improved mic design, and multi-room capabilities.

Launches October 31. Pre-order for $100.

Echo Spot

The Echo Spot is essentially a mini Echo Show. Measuring just 4 inches tall, the Spot was designed to fit anywhere in your home. Its features include Alexa with 2nd generation far-field voice recognition, a built-in speaker, a crisp color 2.5-inch screen, a built-in camera for video calls, and much more. Use it as an alarm clock and wake up to video news briefings or in the kitchen as a high-tech timer and cooking assistant.

Launches December 19. Pre-order for $130.

Fire TV with 4K

The all-new Fire TV looks more like a dongle, but is powerful enough to be considered a set-top box. Its features include support for 4K Ultra HD (up to 60 fps), HDR, and Dolby Atmos Audio, access to the most popular streaming services and Amazon's ecosystem, and of course it has Alexa to help you do everything from order pizza to controlling your lights. It also has an ultra-fast processor and 802.11ac Wi-Fi, so you can expect smooth and responsive performance.

Launches October 25. Pre-order for $70.

Other Tidbits Echo Plus - looks more like the original Echo, shares similar features with the Echo 2, plus it can act as a ZigBee hub, allowing it to quickly discover and pair with compatible devices. Launches October 31. Pre-order for $150. Echo Connect - connects your home phone to a compatible Echo device to call any phone number, just by using your voice. Launches December 13. Pre-order for $35. Echo Buttons - hockey puck-shaped devices that consist of a single large, light-up button. Owners can use them to play games in conjunction with an Echo device—think of a buzzer for trivia-type games. Comes in packs of two. Amazon says these are coming later this holiday season.

The new Echo speaker is set to arrive ahead of Apple's HomePod speaker launch, and will cost less than a third of its price. The new 4K Fire TV also undercuts Apple's recently unveiled 4K Apple TV quite a bit on price. It'll be interesting to see how consumers vote with their wallets this holiday season.

What do you make of Amazon's new products? Plan on purchasing any?

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Amazon to take on HomePod with more stylish, better-sounding Echo this fall

Christian Zibreg ∙ July 13, 2017

Amazon is working on the next Echo accessory that should feature significantly improved sound quality over the current lineup of Echo smart speakers, Engadget reported Thursday.

The gizmo will reportedly include “several tweeters” versus the one large tweeter and a woofer in the existing Echo. The company is also improving the new Echo's microphone technology, “though it's unclear how it's doing so.”

Current Echo devices have seven far-field mics, while Apple's HomePod has six and Google's Home has two.

Shorter and slimmer than the original Echo, which released two years ago, the next Echo will be more stylish than its predecessors thanks to rounded edges and a cloth-like covering.

Amazon is allegedly planning for a fall release.

Echo has been lauded as the best voice-activated speaker on the market in terms of AI and voice features, but with poor audio quality. That's in stark contrast to Apple's upcoming HomePod, which many reviewers praised for being the best-sounding smart speaker out there, even outperforming Sonos in terms of sound quality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l_YjBiK7iM

With the next Echo, Amazon is clearly looking to close the gap with HomePod when it comes to audio quality and style.

HomePod features an array of seven horn-loaded tweeters, each with its own custom amplifier, a high-excursion woofer with custom amplifier, internal low-frequency calibration microphone for automatic bass correction and a six-microphone array for far-field Siri and room sensing.

The built-in A8 chip constantly analyzes the music being played through the speaker, as well as the room layout, to continually optimize audio quality using software-based features such as direct and ambient audio beam-forming and transparent studio-level dynamic processing.

HomePod is due to launch this December.

Image: Amazon Echo Show with a built-in display

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Amazon and other competitors are hurting iTunes movie sales and rentals

Christian Zibreg ∙ July 10, 2017

Strong competition from the likes of Amazon and Comcast has halved Apple's market share when it comes to movie sales and rentals, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

The numbers should be taken with a grain of salt because, as the article states, no third parties track market share in the digital-movie business. While that makes exact figures impossible to obtain, Hollywood majors do different amounts of business with Apple and several of them have confirmed “a marked decline in iTunes’ leadership position.”

Sources said iTunes' market share for renting and selling movies has been falling for years, tumbling to between 20 percent and 35 percent from well over 50 percent as recently as 2012.

By comparison, Amazon's market share in that business has recently climbed to around 20 percent, studio executives said. As for Comcast, it now claims about 15 percent of the combined market for movie sales and purchases in the US.

Bernstein Research estimates that iTunes video, music, book and magazine sales in 2016 accounted for an estimated $4.1 billion in revenue, making it the second-largest services business behind App Store sales.

Apple says it's focused on providing users with premium entertainment via video apps on App Store. The company takes a fifteen percent cut on subscriptions sold via App Store.

An excerpt from the article:

An Apple spokeswoman, who didn’t dispute the market-share estimates, said Apple is focused on providing customers with video content across subscription services such as Netflix and HBO, as well as iTunes, where she said movie purchases and rentals have increased over the past year and hit their highest level in more than a decade.

It is no secret that video-subscription services are growing in popularity at the expense of on-demand rentals and movie purchases. Why pay five bucks or more to stream a single movie via iTunes in high definition if you can get a full Netflix or HBO NOW subscription for the price of a single movie download (new movie downloads are priced at $19.99 on iTunes)?

Movies, like music, are meant to be streamed no matter what Apple says about it.

Just like iTunes' market share for digital music purchases has been decreasing as part of the overall industry decline due to the rise of streaming services like Spotify, the same thing is now happening in the digital movie industry.

Apple has offered movies and TV shows on iTunes since 2003.

Apple has been trying for years to persuade Hollywood studios to let it build a so-called skinny bundle of the best channels from the likes of Disney, ESPN and others, to no avail.

Last year, total digital-movie sales and rentals rose a combined twelve percent to $5.3 billion in the US, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

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Amazon to acquire Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion

Christian Zibreg ∙ June 16, 2017

Online retail giant Amazon just made a major retail move by announcing it's acquiring organic grocer Whole Foods Market for $42 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $13.7 billion.

Whole Foods Market in April reported its sixth consecutive quarter of declining sales. The supermarket chain focuses on organic foods without artificial preservatives, colors, flavors, sweeteners and hydrogenated fats.

The deal, subject to customary closing conditions, should be completed during the second half of this year. The acquisition includes Whole Foods Market’s net debt as well.

Whole Foods Market stores and brand will live on and John Mackey will remain the company's CEO. Whole Foods Market’s headquarters will stay in Austin, Texas.

Jeff Bezons, Amazon's founder and chief executive, said:

Millions of people love Whole Foods Market because they offer the best natural and organic foods, and they make it fun to eat healthy. Whole Foods Market has been satisfying, delighting and nourishing customers for nearly four decades—they’re doing an amazing job and we want that to continue.

As Statista noted, the move gives Amazon almost as many stores as Apple: Whole Foods currently has 456 stores worldwide versus 496 Apple Stores across 21 countries.

The online retailer entered the grocery market in 2007 with the launch of AmazonFresh. In other words, Whole Food products will be available for online ordering through AmazonFresh.

Whole Foods Market is the United States' first certified organic grocer. The company is ranked #28 on Fortune’s list of World’s Most Admired Companies for 2017.

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Survey says people more likely to buy Amazon Echo than Apple HomePod

Christian Zibreg ∙ June 14, 2017

Having surveyed 2,200 adults in the United States, research firm Morning Consult Intelligence has found that one out of each three respondents showed interest in Apple's HomePod sight unseen, or approximately 33 percent.

However, “only” 30 percent were interested in the HomePod speaker after being shown a comparison chart with other smart speakers, namely Amazon's Echo and Google's Home.

Among those who already owned Apple products, 45 percent were interested in HomePod and 17 percent said they were most likely to buy it versus 18 percent of the Apple faithful who said they'd be more inclined to buy Amazon's Echo over Apple's device.

What about the overall survey group?

According to AppleInsider:

Within the overall survey group 17 percent said they were mostly like to buy an Echo, and 11 percent the cheaper Echo Dot. Only 9 percent said they would go for a HomePod, below the Google Home's 11 percent.

At $349, HomePod is pricier than Google's and Amazon's inexpensive speakers at $129 and $139, respectively. 57 percent of respondents said price was “Very Important” to them in a smart speaker while for 51 percent speaker quality was more important than the price.

Introduced at the Worldwide Developers Conference last week, HomePod beats both Amazon's Echo and Google's Home in terms of audio quality. The device features a four-inch subwoofer system that delivers clean bass without distortion and as many as seven beam-forming tweeters, each using its own amplifier for sound quality.

Driven by Apple's A8 chip, HomePod provides sound awareness technology that's able to detect when the device is against walls. After mapping its surroundings, it adjusts the sound output accordingly so that the most of the sound is spread out into a wide-open area instead of being muffled against a wall.

We should point out that this isn't a totally fair research because HomePod is still work-in-progress and Apple has not really shown off any other features beyond Siri interactions, HomeKit controls and Apple Music integration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hw9skL-IXc

Even if HomePad makes its December debut with only the aforesaid features, Apple is almost certainly going to add additional capabilities over time via software updates, just as Google and Amazon have been doing with their smart home speakers.

Priced at $349, HomePod will launch in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia this December before gradually expanding to the rest of the world throughout 2018.

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Video: Top 6 WWDC 2017 announcements

Christian Zibreg ∙ June 6, 2017

Apple had a pretty big day at yesterday's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, revealing a bunch of new or updated products and technologies that have set the stage for other important hardware announcements this fall.

If you didn't have the time to sit through the entire keynote talk and are wondering about the big takeaways, our video editor Andrew O'Hara has put together a short five-minute video highlighting the top six announcements Apple made during the WWDC 2017 keynote.

Andrew's main topics of interest include:

tvOS 11 with Amazon's Prime video-streaming app coming to Apple TV watchOS 11 with all the major improvements for workouts, notifications and more macOS High Sierra and core technologies aimed at AR/VR content creation iOS 11 with all of the improvements for your iPhone and iPad iPad Pro and iMac Pro changes and enhancements HomePod, Apple's high-end Siri-enabled speaker with hi-fi sound

And here's the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQBulSRR9Fc

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What's your favorite WWDC 2017 announcement so far?

Post a comment below to let us know!

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Amazon Prime Video coming to Apple TV

Cody Lee ∙ June 5, 2017

Opening up its WWDC 2017 keynote on Monday, Tim Cook announced that Amazon's Prime Video streaming service will be coming to Apple TV later this summer.

The move was reported a few weeks ago, saying that Apple and Amazon had finally reached an agreement on how to split subscription fees. That same article also claimed that the Apple TV would soon be available on Amazon.com, after a two-year hiatus.

Cook kind of sped through this announcement, with few details. We'll update this post if we learn some more information.

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Here’s what people are mainly using their smart speakers for

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated May 20, 2024

Smart speakers such as Amazon's Echo, Google's Home (and, soon, Apple's alleged standalone Siri device) allow users to get answers in the more comfortable settings of their homes.

As these things are always listening, there's no need to press a button or pull a phone out of your pocket. But what exactly are people using Amazon Echo and other smart speakers for?

A ComScore study, charted by Statista, says the most common use case is asking basic questions with 60 percent of US smart speaker owners using their device for simple requests, followed by weather queries (57 percent), playing music (54 percent), setting timers/alarms (41 percent), creating reminders/to-dos (39 percent) and more.

In what's bound to be disappointing to Amazon, the study found that very few users of smart speakers use them to order goods or services online, with just 8 percent of US smart speaker owners using their device to order food/services and 11 percent ordering products online.

According to a May research conducted by digital agency Stone Temple, providing answers to basic questions actually is not Alexa’s strong suit.

Amazon's digital assistant powering the Echo family of devices was able to answer just 20.7 percent of the 5,000 questions asked as part of the experiment.

Siri performed similar to Alexa.

Amazon said today that Echo owners and iOS customers who use the mobile Alexa app or the Amazon shopping app can now enable integration with iCloud Calendar.

Speaking of which, the comScore study found that less than one-third of smart speaker owners in the US (27 percent) use their device to find what's on their calendar for the day or add new appointments to the calendar hands-free.

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