Amazon surprised us at its Fall Devices and Services event with its new Luna cloud-gaming service, along with the expected updates to its line of Echo, Fire TV and Ring products. The event helps Amazon generate buzz as we roll into the holiday shopping season, and for the first time, Prime Day. (The annual sale is usually held in July, but this year it is slated to start on Oct. 13.) That means putting Alexa everywhere — inside homes and out — and addressing privacy concerns, which were a big storyline in 2019 for both Ring and Alexa. In a life-at-home existence, with millions of us hunkered down for the long haul, the connected house concepts that Amazon has been developing for years have become more relevant than ever.
Amazon/Screenshot by Caitlin Petrakovitz/CNET
The company’s Echo and Fire TV products will be its first to earn sustainability badges, and it’s working on reducing power consumption across devices with a new low-power mode and an energy dashboard integrated with Alexa. Amazon also pledged to build solar and wind farms to generate energy to match the consumption of all its devices.
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All of the announcements from Amazon’s crazy fall event
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The company launched a cloud-gaming service on top of Amazon Web Services that runs on PCs, Fire TVs and even iOS. There’s a Luna Plus game channel with a curated set of games, and Amazon is partnering with publisher Ubisoft for Day 1 availability of some of them.
It has a custom $50 controller that connects directly to the cloud rather than the local device.
Read more: Amazon gets into game streaming with Luna
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This is the custom controller that connects directly to the cloud, which Amazon says reduces roundtrip latency by 17 milliseconds to 30 ms, compared to a controller connected via Bluetooth to a PC, Mac or Fire TV.
Amazon/Screenshot by CNET
Redesigned with a new spherical shape and able to adapt to the acoustics of the room, the fourth-gen Echo incorporates features formerly in the Echo Plus. It’s also a bridge to Amazon’s Sidewalk network and includes neural network technology to accelerate Alexa.
Read more: Amazon announces a new spherical Echo smart speaker
It gets the same redesign as the spherical Echo, but now sports a stylish fabric cover and a better speaker.
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Also spherical, with some kid-friendly features, the Kids Edition includes voice profiles for the children and Sidekick, which lets Alexa read to them.
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It now has Zigbee and Sidewalk hubs, and is quiet when it pivots in your direction. For privacy, there’s a built-in camera shutter, and all Echo devices will have a command to review privacy settings and “delete everything I’ve ever said.” It will also support Hulu, Netflix and Prime Video.
Read more: Amazon announces the Echo Show 10
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The Pro 6 is basically the same as the Eero 6, but designed to handle higher bandwidth — up to gigabit, as opposed to 500Mbps — connections.
Ring Car products: $60-$200
Three new car-centric Ring products
Amazon/Screenshot by Juan Garzon/CNET
Ring’s $200 Ring Car Cam will help users document traffic stops, collisions and other road events.
Debuting with Tesla, the $200 Connect uses a vehicle’s built-in external cameras to capture video in the event that something happens to the car while driving or parked.
Lastly, Ring’s $60 Car Alarm plugs into your car’s onboard diagnostic port and uses sound and accelerometer sensors to monitor the vehicle for bumps, break-ins, tows or other events.
There are no product pages on Amazon yet but we’ll add them here when they arrive.
Read more: ‘Alexa, I’m getting pulled over’: Ring debuts three new car-centric devices
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Ring combines a drone and a security cam for a flying…
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It’s similar to the all-new Fire TV Stick, but lacks the integrated TV controls on the remote.
Read more: Every new Alexa feature Amazon just announced: Hunches, Alexa Guard and more
Correction, Sep. 24: The Fire TV Stick’s maximum resolution is 1080p, not 4K as a previous version of this story said.
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Amazon’s hardware chief talks Alexa, privacy and flying…
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