Gadgetory

the video streaming wars are clearly heating up and these are Amazon's latest efforts in this arena we've seen three different devices today there's a new fire TV stick there's a new fire TV box and there's a gaming model too can this compete with Apple Amazon sure seems to think so first let's take a look at the fire TV stick at first glance you might not think it looks like anything new and in truth it's not it's the same hardware but now it's going to have a software update Alexa which is Amazon's cloud-based personal assistant has been added to the fire TV stick and the fire TV stick now comes bundled with a remote beforehand you had to buyer the fire TV stick and a remote separately now they're coming together for 50 dollars people who have the current fire TV stick and also get these updates later this year then there's the second-generation fire TV box which has both performance updates and improvements in video quality amazon says this has been redesigned from the inside out completely it has 75% faster performance it has a GPU that's two times faster even the remote which by the way it looks a lot like the remote from last year it's supposed to have up to 20% lower latency which is really important when it comes to things like voice search and has a 40% longer battery life like the fire TV stick the remote for Amazons fire TV box now comes with Alexa unlike the new Apple TV the Amazon fire TV box supports 4k Ultra HD content now of course you have to have a 4k display or TV and you have to be watching 4k content or to really reap the benefits of this now Amazon says even if you don't have 4k display or 4k content that you're watching the Box supports HEV C that stands for high efficiency video coding it's supposed to be 2 times more efficient when it comes to encoding and distributing video that's a lot of mumbo jumbo basically it means that even if you're not watching 4k or using a 4k device you're still supposed to have improved video quality the new fire TV box is $100 that's less than the price of the new Apple TV box it goes on sale will for pre-orders today and it's shipping sometime in October then there's the third part of all the new Amazon TV products today and that's around gaming it's a Kindle Fire TV gaming edition it is basically the fire TV box but it comes with a couple of advanced game downloads and it comes with a gaming controller Amazon says this has been redesigned it's supposedly a more precise controller it's organ ominously more comfortable and like everything else we've seen today it has a LexA voice search built into it that bundle is going to run you a hundred and forty dollars Amazon claims that between the box and a stick it was the best selling media player in the US this past summer and they're on path to continue to be bestsellers but let's face it there's a lot of competition out there and we'll have to see how well these actually work