Amazon Hardware Event 2023: Pre-Order A New Echo Show, Streaming Sticks And More

The new Echo Show 8 aims to be your new smart home hub. With its sizable screen and edge to edge display, it’s a capable system for interacting with Alexa, agendas, grocery lists and more. Its upgraded camera and enhanced background noise removal should also upgrade communication with the device as well. Amazon also built in Matter support, so it can interface with more smart home devices.

Amazon put an emphasis on audio as well, with the new Echo Show 8 offering a curved back that packs in a three-speaker spatial audio system and room adaptation technology to tune playback to the room it’s in.

The system has some extra smarts under the hood as well. Amazon’s planning on faster responses to commands with local processing of requests. The system also adjusts the content it displays using computer vision, so if it detects you’re far from the Echo Show 8, it’ll display features like time and weather on a larger scale while adding the finer details as you move closer.

The Echo Show 8 is available for pre-order today at $150 and ships next month.

The Echo Pop Kids isn’t quite a new product so much as one of the colorful, kid-friendly reskins Amazon offers on its products, the Amazon Echo Pop. Featuring the same Alexa voice controls, it can keep the content safe for kids while giving them access to silly songs, fun facts of the day and more. The family-friendly model comes with either a Marvel Avengers or a Disney Princess skin and includes a complimentary six-month subscription to Amazon Kids+. It’s available for pre-order today at $49 and ships in October.

Amazon’s Echo Frames get an update with a revised design and enhanced hardware. The big upgrade is a six-hour battery life, making for 40% more playback and 80% more talk time compared to the 2nd Gen Echo Frames. They support multi-point audio and should be easy to switch between connected devices.

Amazon has improved the speakers and mic capabilities as well. The speakers should better direct audio into your ears and see less of it spill out into your surroundings. Meanwhile custom-built speech processing technology is aimed at detecting your voice better in difficult conditions. The new Echo Frames start at $269. Availability hasn’t been confirmed yet, but Amazon is offering a sign-up to add it to your cart when pre-orders go live.

The Echo Hub is designed to mount onto your wall and serve as the one-stop shop for smart home control. It has an eight-inch touchscreen to allow plenty of controls at once or multiple live camera feeds. The Echo Hub supports Matter, Thread and more smart home ecosystems. It can also make local smart home connections to enable faster response to controls. The real perk? You can see multiple camera feeds and use the controls from an Alexa across from your home at the tap of a button. The Echo Hub is coming later this year for $180 but you can pre-order it now.

Amazon’s new Fire TV Soundbar is geared for an upgrade to the audio you’ll get with its TV devices. It’s a simple, single device—no satellite speakers or subwoofer—but considerably affordable at $120. It promises easy setup and rich sound, and is compatible with Alexa. Available today, it’s compatible with all of Amazon’s Fire TV streamers and TVs.

Amazon dropped two new ways to stream today, announcing two new Fire Sticks, the Fire TV Stick 4K and the Fire TV Stick 4K Max. For the former, its new 1.7GHz processor is said to be 30% more powerful than that of its predecessor, which should make accessing apps and navigating content a smooth experience. That’s further helped by Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, which can provide more bandwidth for streaming 4K content. The new streaming stick is available for pre-order today at $50.

For $10 more, you can grab the $60 Fire TV Stick 4K Max. This new model upgrades things even further with a 2.0GHz processor and Wi-Fi 6E that can jump onto the higher-speed 6GHz band of compatible routers. Like its predecessor, this stick offers Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos for high-quality home theater experiences as well as HDR and HDR10+, giving you a broad range of support for content.