Category: Amazon

John Paczkowski:

Incidentally, that Amazon Prime Video is the exception to the conga line of content offerings above is entirely Amazon’s doing. A magnanimous Apple tells BuzzFeed News that “all are welcome” on its new Apple TV platform. But Amazon — which recently purged Apple TV from its store — doesn’t have a Prime Video app in the Apple TV App Store. And as of a few days ago, it hadn’t submitted one. (An Amazon spokesperson told BuzzFeed News the company “doesn’t have anything to share” on the topic.)

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When Apple showed off the new Apple TV last month, my first thought was “I want Amazon Prime Video on this thing,” but that dream may be dying.

Spencer Soper points out that the gulf between Apple and Amazon is growing:

The Seattle-based Web retailer sent an e-mail to its marketplace sellers that it will stop selling Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast. No new listings for the products will be allowed and posting of existing inventory will be removed Oct. 29, Amazon said. Amazon’s streaming video service, called Prime Video, doesn’t run easily on rival’s devices.

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Dieter Bohn:

Amazon is updating the Kindle Paperwhite today with a new display, now at 300 pixels per inch. That’s twice as sharp as the last iteration and the equal of the more expensive Kindle Voyage. Essentially, at $119, it takes away the biggest reason to opt for the $199 Voyage, whose advantages over the Paperwhite now mainly include a flush glass screen and separate page-turning “buttons” on the side. Amazon points out that the Voyage also has a higher-contrast, brighter screen — but the question is whether all of those things put together are worth the extra $80.

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I can’t decide if this is genius, if society as we know it is over or if Amazon is getting started on April 1 early.

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With Amazon Prime on sale today for just $72, I realized just how much the service has been in the news recently, and how hard it can be to explain to someone just what Prime is.

The core of Amazon Prime is made up of five features:

• Fast shipping
• Prime Instant Video movie and TV streaming service
• Prime Music with unlimited streaming and cloud storage
• Prime Photos - Amazon’s cloud photo management solution
• Kindle Owner’s Lending Library - Access to 50,000 Kindle books available for free rent

The list of five above isn’t everything that comes with a Prime membership. There’s also Amazon Lightning Deals, Prime Pantry, Amazon Elements and more.

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Yesterday, Amazon announced Echo, a device that could be best summed up as Siri in a can.

The $199 cylinder plugs into the wall, and when activated with a “wake word.” Once it’s listening, it can handle all sorts of requests according to Amazon:

• News, weather, and information: Hear up-to-the-minute weather and news from a variety of sources, including local radio stations, NPR, and ESPN from TuneIn.
• Music: Listen to your Amazon Music Library, Prime Music, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio.
• Alarms, timers, and lists: Stay on time and organized with voice-controlled alarms, timers, shopping and to-do lists.
• Questions and answers: Get information from Wikipedia, definitions, answers to common questions, and more.

The introduction video, although a little hokey, shows the device in action, in the daily lives of a family:

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These days, it’s hard to argue in favor of dedicated devices.

Smartphones have taken the place of consumer video recorders, point-n-shoot cameras and even the iPod.

Fitness bands — despite several recent product announcements from Jawbone, Fitbit and Microsoft — will seem silly once the Apple Watch hits shelves early next year.

In this world, Amazon continues to release e-ink Kindles each year, despite themselves making an entire line of iPad-style tablets.

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Álvaro Serrano:

The truth is, blood glucose measurement support in the Health app is ridiculously rudimentary as it is, even if it worked properly. A typical person with diabetes needs to monitor their blood sugar levels anywhere from 3 to 10 times a day, sometimes even more (you need to take additional tests in case of hypoglycemia, which is a fairly common event). There’s no way a significant portion of those people are going to take the extra effort to manually log each and every measurement in the Health app. I know I don’t, and if this feature has failed to encourage me — an Apple enthusiast and technologically savvy young man — to use it, its chances of convincing regular users are pretty slim.

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The Kindle Voyage is the Paperwhite’s replacement. With a glass-covered, flush-mounted 300ppi display and new — and seemingly better — controls to turn pages, this is my next Kindle.

(Condolences to the Paperwhite sitting on my night stand as I type this.)

The Paperwhite is still around, but is now the middle tier, siting above a new $69 model that sports physical page-turn buttons and a touch screen, but no backlight.

Amazon’s tinkered with their tablet line as well, but the only mildly interesting one is the $149 Fire HD Kids Edition. Dieter Bohn at The Verge explains:

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I got this as an email since I’ve published using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform, and could hardly believe what I was reading. Regardless of which group is in the wrong here (Spolier Alert: both are), this hit me as incredibly unprofessional and unbecoming.

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Yesterday, Amazon announced its Fire Phone, a 4.7-inch smartphone running the company’s forked version of Android that can be found on its tablet offerings.

The phone is interesting in and of itself. While the industrial design is a little boring, the inclusion of four cameras to power the device’s unique “Dynamic Perspective” technology that takes a 3-D interface and makes it (probably) useful.

The software is just as interesting. The phone comes with an online cloud service. By owning of the whole stack — cloud services, front-end web services and devices — Amazon is sitting at the big-boy table with Apple and Google. I only expect the company to grow these offerings over the coming years.

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Amazon:

The goal of this new delivery system is to get packages into customers’ hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles.

Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years as we advance the technology and wait for the necessary FAA rules and regulations.

I have many, many questions about this, but the biggest one is this: will this ever actually happen? My guess is no.

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