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Fire TV Stick Unveiled by Amazon

After the Fire Phone’s not so excellent performance and Amazon’s staggering losses in the September quarter, the tech giant has unveiled the Fire TV stick, a media-streaming device which plugs into a TV set much like a USB stick and lets users browse anything from music to videos from Netflix, Hulu and Pandora.

The Fire TV stick seeks to extend its reach into customer’s digital lives by streaming content from Amazon’s Prime service, as well as other providers such as Showtime, Spotify or Netflix. According to Amazon’s announcements, the device will be released on the 19^th of November, although eager users are free to order it immediately.

Costing $39, the Fire TV Stick plugs into the high-definition port of your TV and comes equipped with a remote control. It mirrors media content and application from phones or tablets in addition to streaming content, Amazon statements said.

With the introduction of the Fire TV stick, it’s clear that competition with home-media services is stepping up. Following Amazon’s introduction of the Fire TV box this year, the Fire TV stick seems to attempt to compete with Google’s plug-in device, the Chromecast, which retails at a price of $35 and tops Amazon’s electronics best sellers. The Chromecast has also topped other Roku Inc. and Apple Inc. offerings.

“The Fire TV Stick will be a natural progression of the Fire TV,”

Morningstar Inc. analyst, RJ Hottovy said in a statement.

“They will have more success among core Amazon Prime users, but it will be more difficult switching customers away.”

Amazon’s Fire TV Stick is able to directly sync with the Fire TV box and is expected to drive more $99 annual subscriptions to Prime, thus offering free of charge fast shipping as well as instant video streaming access.

The tech giant is offering a 30-day membership to Prime free of charge for every Fire TV Stick purchase. In addition, current Prime members also have bonuses: for the first two days, they can preorder the Fire TV stick for just $19.

Amazon describes its device as being more powerful than Google’s Chromecast, however, after last week’s debacle of an earnings announcement, when the Fire Phone proved to be a disappointment, many question whether the company’s attempts at adding more products would indeed bring innovation to its future.

The tech giant’s shares have already gone down 0.5 percent on Monday morning, indicating that the market no longer trusts Amazon as it did in the past.

Cloud Drive Photos App Updated

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Amazon has received many positive reviews on their recently released piece of gadgetry, the Fire TV. It has proven to be a serious competitor for Chromecast, Roku or even Apple TV. It seems to us that Amazon is releasing new products and updating a lot of their older ones in order to provide its users with the best experience.

Amazon has news for the users of the Cloud Drive photos app. Before this update, the app uploaded videos and photos from a camera and put them in a big folder. One could not navigate through the pictures, there was a chronological order but that didn’t help much if you wanted to browse through them. If you wanted to find a particular photo you had to scroll through a big list. Amazon has finally made things simpler.

The new updated version of the Cloud Drive photos app called version 3.0 comes with a timeline feature that allows you to move through your picture collection and find the ones from a particular month or year. Though it doesn’t look as good as Dropbox’s Carousel, the Cloud Drive photos app helps you find the photos by date and it does it in a faster way. One can also see every uploaded video thanks a special video section.

With this update Amazon promises to deliver an easier way to navigate by redesigning the layout so that one can get to their frequently used features as quickly as possible. One of the design updates is the progress bar that shows you what videos or photos have been backed up on the storage cloud. Cloud Drive photos app is universal and you get 5GB of storage for free.

Cloud Drive photos app – pricing

If you want more storage Amazon’s plans are $10 per year for 20GB and $500 per year for 1TB of cloud storage. You can also view your photos and videos from the Cloud Drive photos app on Amazon’s recently released Fire TV streaming box.

The Cloud Drive photos app update and the Fire TV are just some of the changes that Amazon has for us. In June 2014 it is rumored that Amazon will release their first smartphone, which supposedly will be a 3D phone. We can’t wait to see, try and tell you more about it.

What do you think about the updated Cloud Drive photos app? Have you tried it yet? Do you think it improved the user’s experience with the new features? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

The Rumors Are Out: Amazon Smartphone Is On Its Way

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It looks like the world’s biggest online retailer, Amazon, will dive into the crowded market of smartphones. Of course, this doesn’t really come as a big surprise to anyone since they’ve begun to expand their field of expertise from online retail store to electronic smart products. Last week Amazon launched the Fire TV, a box which streams TV shows, music and games right into the TV. Now they’ve announced that an Amazon smartphone is on its way, so Apple and Samsung, be warned because you might have a serious competitor here.

Amazon said that they will release it in the second half of this year, somewhere around the end of June and will be shipped to customers by the end of September, just in time for the holidays.

From what Amazon says, their smartphone will be like nothing else available on the market at the moment. What makes it special is that the screen will actually display 3D images which can be seen without any special glasses. The images displayed will be something like a hologram, from Amazon explained. The Amazon smartphone has been shown to developers in Seattle and San Francisco and we’re dying to see what it looks like. From what the rumors are saying it sounds like this could be one of the very first 3D smartphones to appear on the market.

It sounds like Apple and Samsung will have a serious competitor in the world of smart mobile devices, which they currently dominate.

The Amazon smartphone is part of their strategy to expand from retail to multimedia, something that started with the popular E-reader, the Kindle which proved to be a huge success among people who love to read.

Amazon started in 1994 and has become the largest online retail store in the world. It has given book lover one of the greatest inventions ever, the Kindle with all its variations.

Amazon smartphone – further details still remain unknown

For the time being further details about the Amazon smartphone have not been made public but as soon as there is an official press conference we’ll keep you updated with the latest news.

So what do you think about Amazon’s plans to release a smartphone? Do you think that the market is overpopulated or it could always need a new smart mobile device? Do you think it will be something original or a copy of a copy? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.