Amazon Fire TV Streaming Media Player

Amazon Fire TV ($99) was announced today and it will compete with Apple TV and Roku. The box will stream video, audio and play games. Amazon already has announced Disney, Double Fine , Gameloft, 2K and Ubisoft as publishers. Users can stream music from their Amazon libraries and apps such as Pandora, TuneIn and iHeartRadio.

As for video streaming, Amazon Prime instant video will be part of the system and obvious services such as Netflix, Hulu Plus and YouTube will be supported. WatchESPN, MLB.tv, NBA, Crackle, Bloomberg TV and others will also be part of the mix.

Kindle Fire HDX: A Hotter Amazon Than Wonder Woman?

The star of Amazon’s newly refreshed line of tablets is the Kindle Fire HDX, and it appears to be a faster, sexier, and smoother experience on all fronts. Available in 7-inch and 8.9-inch versions, the HDX ($229-$579) certainly appears prettier in its revamped molded magnesium body, with its buttons in better places, and oh yeah, sharper screens (the 8.9-incher owns a 2,560×1,600-pixel-resolution screen). One new feature seems perfect for the technologically challenged (or lonely) user: the ‘Mayday’ button. Just tap it and Amazon says you’ll be chatting up a live tech support specialist (G-rated material only) within 15-seconds. That’s 29 minutes and 45 seconds faster than Domino’s guarantees its pizza deliveries, by the way. The guts of the HDX models include a 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM, a quad-core Adreno 330 GPU, and internal storage in either 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB varieties. The Wi-Fi HDX will start shipping November 7, while the 4G model heads out on December 10.