Commerce

Amazon’s Fire Phone Is $200 on Contract and Comes With a Year of Prime

If you had your breath held for something crazy like a Fire Phone free with Prime, you can exhale now. The new Fire Phone will be a standard $200 (for a 32GB) on contract from AT&T, which is getting the Fire Phone as an exclusive. https://gizmodo.com/amazons-fire-phone-is-here-at-last-developing-1592702508 The upside is that the phone will come with…

Firefly: Amazon’s Fire Phone Can Identify Almost Anything

Amazon’s new Fire Phone had to be about getting people to buy stuff from Amazon, right? Of course. Enter Firefly, which turns the Fire Phone into a sort of universal object scanner that’ll recognize books, DVDs, or jars of Nutella, and help you buy them—from Amazon. This sounds a lot like both Amazon Flow and…

Fire Phone Is Getting Amazon’s Awesome 24-7 Video Tech Support

Like Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets, the new Fire Phone will get Amazon’s 24-7 video tech support, Mayday. The service works over Wi-Fi and 3G/4G, and connects you with a representative in under 15 seconds, according to CEO Jeff Bezos. https://gizmodo.com/amazon-building-24-7-365-video-tech-support-into-kindle-1381717261

Amazon Fire Phone: An All-Seeing 3D Prime Contender

We’ve been hearing the rumors for weeks (months? years?), and the day has finally come. Amazon’s phone is here. It’s called the Fire Phone, and it’s got some fancy new tricks. Dynamic Perspective (3D Display) As rumored, the Fire phone will have a unique 3D interface called Dynamic Perspective. It can shift the image on…

​Amazon’s 3D Smartphone: Everything We Think We Know

Today, Amazon will announce a mysterious new device, and we’re pretty darn sure it’s going to be the crazy 3D smartphone that’s been rumored for over a year. Here’s what the rumor mill suggests is coming our way soon. What will it be called? Probably the Kindle Phone. Maybe a Kindle Fire Phone. After the…

A Look Inside the Amazon Lab Behind Tomorrow’s 3D Smartphone

Tomorrow, Amazon unveils its entry into the smartphone arena , a long-rumored device that supposedly uses eye-tracking tech to create the first 3D smartphone display . BloombergBusinessweek spoke to some of Amazon’s mad scientists for the inside story on Lab126, the skunkworks tasked with making the 3D phone a reality. As Brad Stone (author of…

WSJ: AT&T Will Be the Exclusive Carrier For the Amazon Smartphone

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Amazon’s much-rumored and eagerly awaited smartphone will be exclusively carried by AT&T when it launches. https://gizmodo.com/amazons-3d-smartphone-everything-we-think-we-know-1586225798 According to “people familiar with the plans,” the smartphone—expected to be announced at an event on Wednesday June 18th—will “extend Amazon’s relationship with AT&T, which also provides wireless service to Kindle tablets…

U.S. Government Investigates Recent Worker Deaths at Amazon Facilities

Amazon has an aggressive schedule for opening new distribution centers around the world. The company has opened over 50 new facilities since 2010 in an effort to make same-day delivery the norm rather than the exception. But are these facilities playing fast and loose with worker safety? The U.S. Department of Labor announced this week…

Amazon Prime, the Best Deal in Tech, Just Keeps Getting Better

For years we’ve been saying that an Amazon Prime subscription is simply the best deal in tech. You get so darn much for your money that you’d be crazy not subscribe. And in the few months since we last said it, Prime has only become a better deal, thanks to new services like today’s unveiling…

Amazon Prime Music Impressions: Free With Prime! But Not Quite Enough

Prime Music is a free benefit for legions of Amazon Prime members. It makes Prime an even better deal than it already was. But is it so good that you can give up your other music services altogether? Here’s a brief investigation based on a couple of hours of use. Selection When I learned the…

Amazon Prime Music: One Million Songs, Free For Prime Subscribers

Here comes Prime Music, a free service for Amazon Prime subscribers with over a million songs available for streaming and cached download. Amazon Prime was already an amazing deal—perhaps the best in all of tech—and today, it’s getting even better. Like free two-day shipping and Prime Instant Video, Prime Music will be one of the…

Amazon’s Streaming Music Service Is Here

Amazon has just launched Prime Music: a free streaming music service for its Prime members that provides access to more than one million songs without ads. Free to all Prime subscribers—though there’s a 30 day free trial available if you’re not—the service seems to be centered on playlists, with a number of pre-curated choices being…

Best Buy Will Deliver a Dryer for Free But the Power Cord Has a $70 Fee

What with Amazon and Google Shopping Express winning the world’s laziest misanthropes’ affections, other companies are left doing everything they can to stay in the fight. In Best Buy’s case, that means offering free shipping on major appliances—and (apparently) praying that folks don’t realize the $30 required cord ships for more than double that. Discovered…

Amazon Is Now Playing Hardball With Warner Over the Lego Movie and More

Amazon has already admitted that it’s screwing with Hachette, but now it transpires that Bezos & Co. have stopped taking pre-orders for upcoming Warner Home Video offerings including The Lego Movie, 300: Rise of an Empire, and Transcendence. The New York Times reports that the refusal to sell the movies is part of an ongoing…

You can now buy your new Kindle or Kindle Fire on an installment plan from Amazon.

Report: Amazon Is Launching a Service To Help You Find a Babysitter

Reuters reports that later this year Amazon will start testing a marketplace for services, where users can find and hire everything from babysitters to handymen. It will be testing the service in limited areas to gauge demand and figure out logistics before moving forward with a broader launch. According to the report, Amazon has been…

Colbert Gives Amazon the Finger For Shady Book Selling Tactics

In the wake of Amazon’s questionable tactics in dealing with publishing house Hachette, many Amazon shoppers are questioning their loyalty to the mega-seller. Stephen Colbert, not one to hide his anger, unleashed on Amazon in a less-than-subtle way last night. A big reason for the anger in this case is that Colbert’s own books are…

Looks Like Amazon’s Launching Its Rumored Smartphone on June 18th

Amazon just announced a mysterious launch event in Seattle on June 18th. Well, really, we pretty much know what it’s going to be. Though we can’t be sure, the video attached to the invitation all but reveals that Amazon will announce the 3D smartphone we’ve been hearing about forever. The teaser video above hints at…

What’s the Most Expensive Thing You Can Find on Amazon?

This week, Amazon added (absurdly expensive) commemorative coins to the long list of things you can buy at from its sprawling online bazaar. And while none of us is going to go drop a couple mil on a coin—even with free shipping—it got us to thinking: what’s the most expensive item on Amazon? http://www.amazon.com/b/?tag=gizmodo08c-20 We…

The National Football League has announced that its new digital network, NFL Now—which launches August— will be available on Amazon Fire devices and Roku as well as iOS, Android and Windows.