Amazon Echo

Amazon has a new product called Echo. We wrote about it in our most recent Deals Of The Week Blog article, the folks over at Amazon are very excited about it, BUT the product does have it’s naysayers (particularly concerning the price and similarity to other services).

So let’s have a look!

It’s a futuristic little guy, a black cylindrical speaker with a voice, called and responding to ‘Alexa’. It functions very similarly to how Siri does within an Apple device.

Little Alexa sits in a room in your house, waking up when the word ‘Alexa’ is spoken. A nice hands-free touch that will be great for solving general knowledge arguments. It answers any questions you have, as well as having the ability to complete functions and tasks for you such as playing music, setting an alarm and creating and editing lists.

Echo (slightly confusing with the 2 names, Amazon) has 7 microphones and far-field voice recognition capability that can detect a request from anywhere in a room and speakers that can fill any room.

If you buy Echo, you are also purchasing access to Amazon Music, Prime Music, iHeartRadio and TuneIn, and as Echo has Bluetooth, you will also be able to play music from a phone or tablet though the Echo. Which is definitely cool.

Similar to Siri, it’s designed to learn over time, and you can use part of the functionality (such as shopping lists and alarms) through the accompanying Amazon Echo App (unfortunately but not unexpectedly only on Android or Fire O/S), or through a web interface.

We can definitely see the opportunities and futuristic functionality of Echo, but perhaps the current price is a little high for something that is so similar to the free (within purchased devices of course) services of Siri and Google Now. We do look forward to having a play with the little dude.

Right now if you’re an Amazon Prime member you can purchase the Echo/Alexa for only $99 which is $100 off the real price tag of $199 for everyone else, however you still have to request an invitation to be able to buy it.

Apple Stops Selling Fitbit Products

In what has seemed like a long time coming, Apple has pulled another line of products from it’s retail stores. You’ll remember not long ago Apple stopped selling Bose products, and now they’ve stopped selling Fitbit products in both online and physical retail stores.

This move was not unexpected by anyone, as FitBit products are not only seemingly in direct competition with what the iPhone and more specifically the Apple Watch will provide in combination with the Healthkit, but Fitbit had recently announced that they had no plans to integrate with Apple Healthkit as it was ‘working on other exciting projects’ for it’s users.

Last week, Fitbit announced a new Surge “Fitness Super Watch” that also includes GPS functionality and a heart rate monitor, bringing the similarities to the health functionality of the Apple Watch even closer.

Apple is still selling other fitness tracking products, such as the UP from Jawbone and the Nike Fuelband. It is unclear how much longer these products will remain in Apple stores, or if the specific ban is less to do with competition and more related to Fitbit’s unwillingness to integrate with Apple’s Healthkit.

You can still get Fitbit products in most major retailers.