A woman receives a package from Amazon that presumably does not contain a Chromecast
If you’re looking to buy an Chromecast online, you may need to look somewhere other than Amazon in the very near future. A new report from Bloomberg claims that an internal email at indicates the retailer will block sales of Google’s streaming device because it doesn’t support Amazon Prime Video.
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If you pre-ordered the Huawei Watch, you might be interested in knowing that your order has most likely shipped. If you haven’t ordered a Huawei Watch yet, though, and you plan to, I have especially good news: The device is now available for shipping within 1-2 business days from the Google Store, Amazon, and other outlets.
The Huawei Watch starts at $350, with model availability varying between outlets. The Google Store, for instance, only offers the “Silver” Huawei Watch with a Milanese-like bracelet. Amazon, however, offers three different variants, black w/ link bracelet, silver w/ leather band, and stainless w/ stainless link bracelet, at $350, $400, and $450, respectively.
The Huawei Watch packs a 1.4-inch screen in a 42mm body and a 400 x 400 resolution screen at 286 pixels per inch. It sports 512 MB of RAM, 4 GB of on-board storage, a gyroscope & accelerometer, PPG (photoplethysmogram), and a barometer. There’s also a built-in mic, with all of this powered by a 300 mAh battery.
We have lots of Huawei Watch content on the way, so keep and eye out for our full review and more.
A press render of Amazon’s upcoming 10-inch Kindle Fire tablet has been leaked ahead of its alleged launch. Although we’re light on specs, the renders show the (rather uninspiring) design of the next Kindle Fire. The image comes from well-known and usually reliable leaker, Evan Blass on Twitter.
From the renders, it appears the next Kindle Fire will have a completely flat front and back, with a slightly more angled, metallic frame around the edges. We can just about make out the power/sleep key on the top edge as well as the front and rear camera. Amazon’s branding is expectedly prominent, although the software is a completely different story. If the render is accurate, it looks like Amazon’s new software will be much more in line with standard Android. Or, at the very list, Amazon software disguised as standard Android. Whatever the software is, it’s a far cry from Amazon’s previous efforts.
Previous Kindle Fire tablets have featured a cover flow-like user interface, pushing Amazon apps and content to the forefront, similar to the UI found on the Amazon Fire TV and Stick. If Evan’s leak is anything close to the finished product (which it normally is), it’ll certainly make a refreshing change from a user experience perspective.It almost certainly has something to do with having fewer staff to work on skins after the job cuts recently. Perhaps it’s a lesson learned by Amazon after the catastrophic failure that was the Fire Phone. A shift to a more familiar UI will surely make the product less confusing to regular consumers.
We don’t yet have a release date, price or specs for the 10-inch tablet, but there have been rumors of a $50 6-inch model which is expected to hit the market in time for the holiday season. Both tablets will likely be announced and released at the same time to take advantage of the busy Q4 shipping period.
![Speck_DFI_Ad_CS-Stacked-Cube_728x90_v1[2]](https://9to5mac.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/speck_dfi_ad_cs-clear_rev_728x90_v1.jpg?quality=82&strip=all)
In news which will surely be no surprise to anyone, Amazon is no longer selling the unloved Fire Phone. Head on over to the Amazon Fire Phone’s product page and you’ll notice the phone is “currently unavailable” in both the 32GB and 64GB storage flavors. Despite many attempts to get people to notice its first smartphone, it seems Amazon didn’t do enough to make it appealing. Amazon confirmed to GeekWire that “the company sold out of its inventory of Fire Phones in the U.S. and globally at the end of August.”
The WSJ is reporting that Amazon is going to strip down a 6-inch tablet and sell it for $50 for the holidays. What’s amazing is that the theoretically color tablet was cheaper to make than even an ebook display version:
Mr. Bezos had set an internal goal of the $50 price tag for versions of both the Fire tablet and Kindle e-reader, viewing the rock-bottom prices as a crucial lure for a more cost-conscious group of buyers, the people said. But the e-reader screen technology from its vendors ultimately proved too expensive to drop the retail price, the people said. Amazon’s cheapest Kindle sells for $79.
It is likely that the $50 Tablet will be a pared down version of the already minimalist $99 6-inch Kindle which has gone on sale for as little at $69 in recent months. The report cites a mono speaker as one of the cost cutting initiatives but the company will likely drop things like cameras, display quality and battery life.
What might be more interesting to me is that Amazon is said to have fired many from its FireOS group in the wake of the Fire Phone flop and subsequent $170M writedown…
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Amazon offers the Unlocked Motorola Nexus 6 32GB in Midnight Blue or Cloud White for $349.99 shipped. That’s $300 off the original list price, $150 less than Best Buy’s current listing, and the lowest we’ve ever seen. The move is likely a clearinghouse before new Nexus devices are revealed on or around September 29th. It is also in response to the newly on sale Moto X which has similar/better specs and a $399 price tag.
The Nexus 6 is still an incredibly solid phone and one of only a few options if you want to play with Andoid M Marshmallow right now.
Amazon shoppers gave it 4.2/5 stars. Last year’s 9to5Google review is here.
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Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service previously only allowed users of Amazon’s own Fire-branded Android devices to download content for offline viewing, but today the company announced it’s expanding that privilege to all iOS and Android users.
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A report in the WSJ suggests that Amazon is most likely abandoning plans to make any further smartphones after the failure of the Fire Phone.
In recent weeks Amazon has dismissed dozens of engineers who worked on its Fire phone at Lab126, its secretive hardware-development center in Silicon Valley, according to people familiar with the matter […]
The company told some smartphone engineers earlier this year that further phone development would be shelved, though one of the people said Amazon has shifted the effort to its hometown of Seattle …
From 9to5Toys.com:
Amazon has launched a new service for Android users that will deliver “over $10,000 in paid apps, games and in-app items” for free. Amazon Underground is replacing the popular Free App of the Day promotion. The promotion page teases Frozen Free Fall, Star Wars Rebels: Missions, and Goat Simulator amongst others that will be available as a part of this promotion.
Here is how you claim your free apps:
First, visit this page and enter your phone number or email address to have the Amazon Underground for Android app sent to your device. After you have received the app invitation, go to your phone settings, tap security or applications, check the Unknown Service Box and hit ‘OK’. Then open your downloads by going to My Files or Files and tap on the Amazon App file. Tap ‘install’ when prompted. Finally, tap ‘Open’ on the Amazon Undergound App and use the menu on the left to navigate to Apps & Games.
Amazon currently lists over 470 games that are apart of this promotion on the Underground page. You’ll find top apps from Disney, ZeptoLab, Zynga and more.
The LG G4 has been around for a couple of months now, and since launch there’s been enough time for a handful of case-makers to get their wares to market. Although there might not be as many options as there are for Galaxy S or HTC One owners, there are still a good few cases on the market which I think you should consider. Unless you have a leather-backed G4, in which case, don’t bother. All the cases in this list came with a warning that they aren’t compatible with the leather back, or will probably ruin it over time…
As more and more Internet usage shifts towards mobile, particularly to smartphones, app developers are recognizing the phone number as an ideal identifier for new users. Snapchat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger are just three examples of hugely popular apps which support signing up using your phone number in lieu of an email address, and which can also use the contact list to build up a network of connections within their apps. Now Amazon is jumping into the fold.
In the newest version of Amazon Shopping for Android, the company’s main mobile experience through which customers can purchase items and track orders, the onboarding flow for new customers has been updated to support signing up using just a name, phone number, and password. New customers who’d prefer to use an email address can click “Use your email instead.” The update hasn’t fully propagated in the Play Store just yet, but can be downloaded right now through APKMirror (click here). For that to work you need to visit Settings > Security on your device and toggle on “Unknown sources.”
This shift to phone number-based identification for apps makes total sense. Phone numbers are a native feature on smartphones – I like to call them an “atomic unit.” SMS and phone calls work right out of the box, whereas with email you have to launch an email app and then sign up and/or authenticate with a third-party provider, just to begin receiving messages. At the very least, by allowing onboarding with phone numbers, app developers make the onboarding process much faster, tremendously reducing the friction and bounce rate (users who download an app but leave before signing up). That’s what Amazon has done here.
Google is pushing ahead with its plans to launch a paid YouTube service by the end of this year. So far, it’s signed up YouTube partners accounting for more than 90% of it views, but major TV networks are still holding out. Fox, NBC and CBS (among others) are still holding back according to Bloomberg’s sources.
Without support from TV networks, YouTube will have to attract paying subscribers with its own original content, or try and attract payers with nothing more than its home-grown stars and music videos. But that doesn’t mean the company is down-beat. There are many more options on its plate.
Almost all phone manufacturers seem to be launching “Plus” handset variants this year, and Micromax subsidiary YU isn’t an exception. The company first launched its YU Yureka handset late last year, and now, you can buy a “Plus” version of the device that packs a higher-resolution screen and some very minor spec improvements across the board…
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Microsoft’s new Universal Foldable Keyboard, first unveiled earlier this year, is now available to purchase online and through Microsoft stores. The super portable Bluetooth keyboard folds in half when not in use and allows users to connect to two mobile devices at once including Android, iPhones, iPads, and Windows devices.
Microsoft notes that the keyboard has full-size keys, a spill-resistant, water-repellent keyboard and outer material, and a built-in rechargeable battery that will get you around three months of use on a charge. There’s also an “OS” button for switching between connected devices. Here’s a closer look at the keyboard:
The Microsoft Universal Foldable Keyboard is available for $100 on Amazon, and it’s also available through Microsoft retail stores and online.
Microsoft made a new video for today’s launch to show off some of the keyboard’s features and its compact, 5mm thin design:
[youtube=https://youtu.be/zNrop5Mwv0g]
If you’ve ever tried to developed a mobile app or website you probably know how frustrating it can be to think what you made is ready to go, only to take it for a spin on a new device in a new environment and find that something is broken. It happens a lot, and Amazon wants to help alleviate some of that frustration with its new AWS Device Farm.
Amazon announced today new sharing functionality for its Kindle app that’s exclusive to the Android version until later this year. The new functionality provides the ability to share quotes, highlights, and book recommendations with friends over a host of different messaging services, and instant book previews for those who are on the receiving end of these shares.
Amazon’s Fire brand of tablets and smartphones has mostly been panned as a flop. The company’s intense focus on being cheap and transferring every last penny of saved value onto the customer seemingly doesn’t translate into a culture good at building attractive devices, it seems. Nonetheless, Amazon has an updated version of the Fire OS that powers these things out and available for developers to test their apps on.
Update: It looks like the Amazon Appstore actually began rolling out to devices with the 10.3.1 update, and that BlackBerry was simply re-highlighting the feature it added previously. Perhaps humorously, it looks like not enough people use BlackBerry devices to even know if the addition is new or not. Some users have told us that they’ve had the Appstore by default since 10.3.1, which makes us think this feature is old. Move along.
BlackBerry is rumored to be going with an Android OS for its next hardware release, according to a report from Reuters last week. But while we haven’t heard anything about that handset quite yet, it looks like BlackBerry is already giving in to the inevitable fact that it just can’t keep up with the competition — on the software front, at least. Starting today, owners of some BlackBerry devices will be receiving an update that gives access to Android apps by way of Amazon’s Appstore…
Sony’s mid-range, IP68-certified dust and water resistant smartphone has started showing up on store shelves in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, but those of us in the US have been mostly in the dark – until today, however.
The phone is being sold on Amazon through a reseller, but fulfilled by Amazon, for $349 unlocked in black with 8GB of onboard storage (no microSD card included). The LTE bands this phone can connect to are supported on all the major US carriers, so bringing it to your favorite shouldn’t be a problem.
You might want to get a microSD card to go along with it, however, as the M4 Aqua out of the box only has 1.26GB of free storage. The phone is otherwise packing a solid punch for the price with a 5.0″ 720 x 1280 pixel-resolution screen, a 1GHz octa-core Snapdragon 610 processor, 13MP rear shooter, and 2GB of RAM.
<a href="http://recode.net/2015/05/27/google-confirms-buy-button-is-coming/">Image via Re/code</a>
Speaking at the Code Conference in California, Google’s chief business officer Omid Kordestani confirmed that the company is in fact planning on adding a “buy” button to search results. This feature has been rumored for several months and is a way for Google to compete more seriously with the likes of Amazon and eBay.
As announced would happen earlier today, the Asus ZenFone 2 is now available on Amazon in unlocked and contract-free fashion. The device is available in a 16GB variant for $200 and a 64GB variant for $300.
From 9to5Toys.com:
Amazon is back with another bunch of free Android apps and games. This time the booty is worth more than $110 and includes a few big name titles. All of these downloads will work on any Android device, but you’ll need to install the Amazon App Store for Android first. Once you do that you’ll be ready to start downloading. This promo ends May 16, 2015 at 11:59 PST. Here are our top picks:
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Moto 360 available for $180 (Reg. $250) for a limited time
