Amazon shows off new tablets and e-readers

Amazon's been busy - the online retailer's launched a raft of new slates and a shiny new operating system to boot.

Tablets

First up are the new tablets include the Fire HD, the Fire HDX, and the Fire HD Kids Edition, the latter designed to take a beating from toddlers.

Amazon says its Fire HD slate is 'the most powerful tablet under $100.' Fighting talk aside, the 6-in tab shows off a 252 ppi display, a 1.5GHz quad-core processor, front- and rear-cameras, and five spiffing colour options.

The Fire HDX is the Fire HD's meaner big brother, pricing up at a far heftier $379, and touting a 2.5GHz CPU, an 8.9-in 339ppi display, dual-cams, and the Firefly product recognition software.

 

The final tablet is the Fire HD Kids Edition, which comes with a 'no questions asked' worry-free 2 year guarantee that'll see Amazon swap out your slate should it get busted up by your child.

The Kids Edition costs $149 for the 6-in version, and promises a quad-core processor, a HD display, and a thick, blue, bonus bezel to add a bit of ruggedness.

E-readers

Next up, Amazon's also made two new additions to its e-reader line-up with the Kindle and Kindle Voyage.

The Kindle prices up at a wallet-coddling $79, with the update seeing a 20% nippier CPU, doubled storage, and a touch-screen display.

The Kindle Voyage is a slightly more jazzed up affair, sporting a $199 price tag and a promise of being the thinnest Kindle yet.

The 7.6mm svelte slate uses a 'next-gen' 300ppi Paperwhite display, a flush glass design, and most excitingly, a free 3G connection that Amazon foots the bill for.

New OS

Amazon's latest operating system, Fire OS 4, is tagged under the name 'Sangria', and will be available for free on all Fire HD and Fire HDX slates.

"When we think about Fire OS, we start with what matters to customers - ease of use and performance," says Dave Limp, Amazon's Senior VP of Devices.

"Fire OS 4 improves in both of these areas, and deeply integrates software, content, and the Cloud to deliver services that are only available from Amazon, including Family Library, Firefly, and free cloud storage for photos."

Amazon’s first smartphone leaked, has 3D display powered by multiple cameras

These days, the majority of smartphones are good, but a dime a dozen — the floor for a quality phone is higher, but the ceiling has plateaued. The only truly gigantic differences between competing phones nowadays are brand loyalty,display size, and operating system (or how much bloat is plastered on top of the same operating system). Regardless of this, Amazon is rumored to think that it can break into the market and make a splash with its own smartphone, and now, some leaked pictures of the device might just corroborate the company’s mentality.

For what seemed like an internet eternity, rumors were swirling about regarding Facebook entering the smartphone market with its own hardware. Eventually (for now), that fizzled out and turned into Facebook Home, what essentially amounted to an Android skin — if you don’t launch your own phone, at least you can try to disguise other phones as your own. For nearly as long as the Facebook phone rumors persisted, there were always rumblings of an Amazon phone. Now, BGR got its hands on what it purports to be that very Amazon smartphone. As you can see from the images above and below, this leak doesn’t consist of a blurry shot taken at a bar with poor lighting. If the clear-as-day images do indeed depict an Amazon smartphone, then it looks like Amazon took an iPhone and smashed it into the middle of the outside casing of a Lumia phone.

According to BGR, the weird iPhone-in-Lumia design is actually the result of a case that’s screwed onto the phone proper, obscuring the true design of the device. Reports suggest the smartphone measures in at 4.7 inches, which would be small compared to the latest big-name phone launches, such as the Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8. The phone is said to only have a 720p display — a resolution that would’ve been brilliant a few years ago, but now falls behind the increasingly standard 1080p — and is also said to pack 2GB of RAMunder the hood, as well as a currently undisclosed Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. The phone will likely run FireOS, a forked version of Android that Amazon uses. However, if you look closely at the leaked shots, you’ll notice something suspicious: multiple front-facing cameras, five in all.

Each corner of the phone is home to a front-facing camera, while the usual front camera used for video chat and taking selfies — and presumably Amazon’s Mayday service — is located toward the edge of the phone in the customary position. Reports claim that the way Amazon plans to utilize these four corner cameras is how the company aims to set itself apart from the saturated smartphone market: a glassesless 3D display. Unlike the Nintendo 3DS, which uses specialized display tech to achieve the 3D effect without glasses, Amazon’s phone will somehow use the four cameras as a tracking system in order to create the 3D effect. A safe guess is that the phone will use the cameras to discern a user’s orientation when looking at the phone, then shift the display to work in conjunction with that perspective to simulate 3D. However, while BGR trumpets the 3D as being a major feature of the phone, other outlets familiar with the matter, such as TechCrunch, aredownplaying the feature, saying it will be very limited out of the box.

Rumors have it that Amazon will announce the phone by June with plans to ship by September. So, we won’t have to wait very long to see if Amazon adds another device under its flagship banner, and so soon after the Amazon Fire TV.