#Fire hd 8 with alexa update

Amazon, meanwhile, climbed to fifth place among tablet manufacturers and accounted for 4.1 percent of total tablet sales. According to market research firm IDC, shipments of tablets globally fell 11.1 percent in the second quarter of this year, and juggernaut Apple reported a 9 percent dip in iPad sell-through over the same period. “In fact, we’ve seen Fire tablet sales more than double year-over-year as a result.” “We believe in a different approach to tablets - providing premium products at non-premium prices - and customers love it,” Kevin Keith, general manager for Amazon’s Fire Tablets arm, said in a press release.

#Fire hd 8 with alexa update

The newly announced Fire HD 8 won’t launch with Alexa integration initially, but it’ll land in the form of an over-the-air (OTA) software update in the coming months. Perhaps the bigger news on Thursday morning involved Alexa, Amazon’s voice-powered assistant capable of juggling tasks from pizza ordering to taxi hailing. Amazon pledged to roll out its nascent digital assistant to most, if not all, of its Fire tablet line in the U.S., including the Fire HD 10, the Kindle Fire, and the previous generation of Fire HD 8. Amazon said that both configurations will be available for pre-order in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan. And it has the same 8-inch 1280 x 800 pixel screen, which works out to a density of about 189 pixels per inch.ĭebuting alongside the new tablet is a variant with identical processing power but double the storage - 32GB - for $120. The new Fire HD 8 packs the same quad-core 1.3GHz processor as last year’s model. Rounding out those silicon enhancements is “50 percent more” RAM (1.5GB total), plus a Micro SD Card slot that can accommodate cards up to 200GB in size. The refreshed model starts with a minimum of 16GB of storage - more than double the 8GB packed in last year’s model - and lasts 12 hours on a charge, four more hours than last year’s model. On Thursday, Amazon announced a refreshed version of the Fire HD 8 it released in September of last year that’s cheaper, significantly more powerful, and is the first of the retail giant’s tablet devices to feature a digital voice assistant.Īt $90, the Fire HD 8 starts at a little more than half the price of the old $150 model, but the hardware’s been improved across the board. Fitbit Versa 3Īpple and Sony weren’t the only ones with new hardware up their sleeve this week.