

SAN FRANCISCO—In a breezy modern home atop one of the city’s steep and iconic hills, Amazon representatives told a small gathering of journalists on Wednesday about their new fall lineup of hardware products. “That we’re in a home is purposeful,” one Amazon rep said, explaining that Amazon has been trying to integrate home automation into its products as it also tries to take over living room entertainment.

That introduction gave way to Amazon’s real announcement: in October, the Seattle-based retailer will ship four new tablets and three updated Fire TV products that it hopes will pave the way to bringing more customers into its ecosystem via Amazon Prime and the Amazon App store.

The four new tablets are called the Fire HD8, the Fire HD10, the Fire, and the Fire Kids Edition. (A theme at Amazon seems to be making it difficult to differentiate new models from tablets and phones released in previous years.)

Amazon

Megan Geuss

The Fire HD8 and the Fire HD10 are the flagship models—with 8” and 10.1” screens, respectively, the two tablet versions have metal backing, and the HD 8 comes in a variety of colors that are 3D printed onto the back. The square tablets feel large but not overly heavy, and while at 7.7 mm they’re not as thin as, say, an iPad Air, the tablets don’t feel cheap.

The screen is not of cheap quality either—the display is laminated to the Gorilla Glass screen, and Amazon representatives claimed that it gives off 400 nits of brightness. Amazon’s spokespeople showed us a scene from Downton Abbey on the HD10, noting the tablet’s 16:10 aspect ratio, which can prevent some letterboxing and windowing for some video formats.

Both tablets also come with stereo speakers and virtual surround sound through the headphone jack. Both also run on a quad-core, 1.5 GHz processor, although Amazon did not provide more details on that front, and they'll be compatible with 802.11ac Wi-Fi networks.

Also, the tablets are good about letting users provide their own storage. The Fire HD8 comes with 8GB of storage, and the HD10 comes with 16GB, but both tablets have a microSD slot for external storage that will take users up to 128GB. The HD8 will be priced at $150, and the HD10 will go on sale for $230.

The two tablets will benefit from a new home screen UI in Fire OS5, as well as features like Amazon Underground, where Amazon buys $10,000-worth of apps from app developers and makes them free to Fire tablet users, and Word Runner, a feature that is supposed to assist speed reading by presenting a book one word at a time at rapid speeds. In addition, users of the HD8 and the HD10 will now be able to download movies and shows not just onto their tablets’ internal storage, but also onto the tablets’ external storage as well.

Amazon also said that it would be introducing a feature called On Deck in the Fire HD8 and HD10. Company representatives said user feedback indicated that people were frustrated when they got to an airport to realize that they forgot to download movies or shows onto their tablets. To solve this problem, the representatives said, the HD8 and HD10 will automatically download a variety of movies and shows when the tablet is plugged in—but that content will automatically be deleted if the user is trying to download something and running into storage limits. On Deck can also be disabled.

Amazon

Amazon

The newest Amazon Fire is probably the most interesting device to hit the market. The 7” IPS display is a bit thicker than the other two tablets, and it’s got a slower 1.3GHz quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM, but at $50, it’s a dramatic bid by Amazon to stay relevant in an area where it’s getting beat by its competitors. In an article in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, the paper noted that Amazon took a $170 million write-down for unsold inventory of its unpopular smartphone and commanded less than 1 percent of the US tablet market in the second quarter of 2015, according to IDC research.

A $50 tablet could attract different kinds of customers, Amazon representatives said, and the company imagined that potential buyers might want the tablets as single-use devices, living exclusively in a bedroom or in the kitchen. To accommodate that potential use case, Amazon will be selling the $50 Fire tablets in packs of six as well as individually. (The six-pack will be sold for the price of five, with the sixth tablet thrown in for free.)

Finally, Amazon showed off its $99 Fire Kids Edition, which is essentially a $50 Fire with a kid-friendly case. The Kids Edition also comes with a two-year “no worry guarantee,” which allows parents to send back broken devices, even if those devices were broken by kids. The devices also come with a year of Amazon’s FreeTime Unlimited service, which includes a vast selection of kid-friendly books, shows, and games that’s curated by humans and cross-checked by child advocacy group Common Sense Media.

The new TV stuff

Finally, Amazon showed off its new living room entertainment devices. These devices were essentially reboots of devices that Amazon has had success with already. The Amazon Fire TV Stick was the first item to be displayed. The stick comes with a dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM, but it now includes a Voice Remote that integrates with Amazon’s voice control system Alexa. Using the remote, users can search for shows or load apps in natural language and can even search for shows across eight third-party apps like Hulu. (Search across 15 more apps could be added in coming months.) The Stick will be sold for $50, although the old version of the Fire TV Stick without Voice control will still be available for its old $40 price.

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon will also reboot its Fire TV. Although the design will remain unchanged (the slim box was well-liked by current customers, Amazon representatives said), the Fire TV will come with a CPU that’s "75 percent more powerful" than the current TV CPU, and a GPU that’s two times faster than the old model. The next-generation Fire TV will come with 8GB of internal storage, with a microSD slot to add more if you want.

In terms of the Fire TV’s UI, the new generation will be geared for 4K content, helping users find movies and shows that take advantage of their cutting-edge TVs. “When you hook a Fire TV up to a 4K TV, the Fire TV recognizes it,” an Amazon spokesperson said. In addition, Fire TV users can augment their viewing by using a feature called Xray, which shows in the bottom of the screen extra information about a movie or show that’s playing, including actors’ names and biographies.

The renovated Fire TV will cost $100.

Finally, Amazon introduced the Amazon TV Gaming Edition, a bundle that includes a redesigned Fire TV game controller, a Fire TV, a 32 GB microSD card and two free games: Shovel Knight and Disney's Ducktales. The game controller, according to Amazon, has “better joystick feel” and better actuation of the buttons, as well as longer battery life and a headphone jack. The whole bundle will cost $140.

All of these items will be available for preorder today and will begin shipping in October.

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