Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos couldn't care less how old your Kindle is.
"We don't need people to be on the upgrade treadmill. If I see people using a 5-year-old Kindle, I'm delighted," Bezos says.
Of
course, he'd be equally delighted to sell you new hardware. Today
Amazon unfurls a potentially disruptive tech-support feature — Mayday —
that's aimed at rescuing people from their frustrations. The free
service arrives with the company's newest tablets, the 7-inch Kindle
Fire HDX, and the 8.9-inch version that you can now pre-order online.
"Our goal is to revolutionize tech support," Bezos says, in an interview
with USA TODAY at Amazon headquarters.
BEZOS INTERVIEW: On 'Washington Post,' Amazon Studios, his legacy
Tech
support? Really? Free? Really. In fact, Mayday is the kind of
knock-your-socks off feature that is not only sure to get attention, but
that will play into Bezos' grand plan to cement Kindle's place in an
excruciatingly competitive tablet market. And, oh yeah, it might just
get you to seriously consider Amazon's latest hardware, too.
Amazon's
three-legged strategy starts, Bezos says, with Amazon selling premium
products at non-premium prices. The 7-inch Kindle Fire HDX starts at
$229, while its 8.9-inch sibling goes for $379 on up. But Amazon has
also upped the specs on last year's Kindle Fire HD model with an all-new
version that drops that price from $199 to $139.
The second part
of the strategy is to make money when people use the devices, not
necessarily when they buy them, since Amazon sells the products at
roughly break-even prices.
The third leg is where an innovative
feature like Mayday comes in, at the intersection between what Bezos
refers to as "customer delight" and deep integration with Amazon's
entire business, including the hardware, operating system, key apps, the
cloud and Amazon Web services.
Bezos belts out an infectious
laugh shortly before demonstrating Mayday, as he poses the question he
says is on all of our minds on occasion: "Am I in control of my devices,
or are my devices in control of me?"
HOW IT WORKS
During
a Mayday session, in fact, you share control with the Amazon support
person who turns up in a small onscreen window within 15 seconds of when
you tap the Mayday button. Though you can see and hear the rep, he or
she can hear but not see you.
What the rep can see, however, is
precisely what you have on your screen, and can take over in real time
to show you how to get things done on the device, or even do them on
your behalf. The rep can also draw on the display to, for example,
circle icons or buttons.
Either one of you can drag the video
window around the screen so that it doesn't sit on top of something that
you need to look at or tap. The screen session can be paused if you
need to type in a password, which the rep won't see.
"Everybody
has that feeling from time to time, no matter how sophisticated of a
user you are," Bezos says. "There are things we do every day, and we get
pretty good at it … and then things in the settings menus or unusual
features that we only do every couple of months or once a year."
Changing
parental controls in Kindle's FreeTime, altering e-mail settings, or
configuring your VPN. "That's when you hit the Mayday button," he says.
Mayday
is available 24/7, 365 days a year, with no time limit on how long you
and the adviser can chat during a given session. I asked Bezos if
anything would prevent people from tapping the Mayday button to merely
mess with the representative or to socialize because they're lonely. "My
prediction is that's going to happen," he said.
BEZOS: MAYDAY ON CHRISTMAS DAY
Bezos
expects to have enough Amazon staffers to meet the Mayday demand. "This
is kind of at the sweet spot of one of the things that Amazon does
well, which is marrying high-tech and heavy lifting. We're going to be
ready for Christmas Day. A lot of people are going to unwrap their
devices and press the Mayday button."
Does Mayday also provide
commerce opportunity for Amazon, with a rep say, steering a customer to a
purchase? "That's not its primary purpose," Bezos maintains, while
adding that studies show that Kindle Fires are heavily used devices.
"And we think this is going to make our devices more heavily used."
For
now, the Mayday feature only works over Wi-Fi, and only with 7-inch and
8.9-inch Kindle Fire HDX models. It won't work with the cheaper new
Kindle Fire HD model.
The 7-inch Kindle Fire HDX with Wi-Fi starts
shipping Oct. 18; a $329 version that adds a 4G cellular option ships
Nov. 14. The Wi-Fi-only 8.9-inch model starts shipping on Nov. 14, with a
$479 4G version shipping Dec. 10. The new Kindle Fire HD (which doesn't
work with Mayday) ships Oct. 2.
While Mayday is the marquee
addition to the latest Fire lineup, it's not the only visible
improvement. (As always, I need to put the hardware through its paces
before reaching a final verdict.)
The screens on both the 7-inch
and 8.9-inch models look terrific, with Amazon bolstering the display
resolution on each compared with the prior generation. The 8.9-inch
model has a resolution of 2560 x 1600 with a ppi (pixels per inch) of
339. The previous 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD had a 1920 x 1280 resolution.
Amazon
has doubled the memory, and upped the ante on the processor, to a new
quad-core Qualcomm 2.2 GHz Snapdragon. Amazon claims increased battery
life for the new tablets, too, up to 11 hours in mixed use and 17 hours
of reading time.
In a design change, the power and volume rocker buttons across the new models move to the back of the device from the sides.
In
the past, Amazon through its X-Ray for Movies and TV feature let you
pull up details (supplied by its IMDb database) on actors the moment
they enter a movie scene you are watching. Now, you can get the skinny
on songs playing in a scene as well, with the ability to purchase
available tracks. Also new to X-Ray: movie "goofs" and trivia.
X-Ray
now also delivers synchronized lyrics when you're listening to music.
And Amazon is letting subscribers of its Prime Instant Videos service
download movies onto the tablets to watch offline on a plane or
elsewhere. Previously you could only stream them.
Via a new
"Second Screen" experience, you can "fling" a movie you are watching
from Fire HDX to a TV enabling you to watch on the big screen, while
e-mailing, browsing, playing a game or following along with X-Ray on the
tablet. Since the X-Ray data reside in the cloud, and not on the tablet
itself, you're not overly taxing the tablet with video-streaming
chores.
"The tablet is no longer the weak link for the quality of
service with the TV because that's coming directly from the cloud,"
Bezos says. The Second Screen feature will be available starting next
month, Amazon says, and it will work with Sony's PlayStation 3 (and
later this year, PlayStation 4), as well as on Samsung TVs. You will
also be able to wirelessly "mirror" movies, TV shows and photos from
your tablets to the big-screen TV if you have Miracast-capable
accessories or TVs.
Amazon has always built its interface for
Kindle Fire on top of Android, and that's still so. But the company is
now playing up its own branded operating system, Amazon Fire OS 3.0
"Mojito." Among other additions, Mojito brings enterprise-level
encryption to the new tablets.
Bezos touched more broadly on the
tablet space during our conversation at Amazon headquarters. "These are
big markets, and there's room for multiple winners pursuing different
strategies, feature sets, focusing on different things," he says.
"(There's) a lot of opportunity ahead — it's still very, very early."
Published on: USAtoday
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