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Lesser known TV maker Element along with Westinghouse have become the first to make TV sets with Amazon’s Fire TV OS built in. The company’s set is a 55-inch 4K panel with access to Amazon’s ecosystem of apps, movies, and games, as well as the Alexa voice assistant, all for just $649.
This is a pretty interesting route from Amazon who seems to be ceding major hardware launches to manufacturing partners in lieu of creating their own. Indeed, the TV business is pretty brutal, and Amazon likely wants to avoid another Fire Phone situation. It does come off as odd considering folks could pay a mere $35 to get this functionality added to any TV, but having a TV with Fire OS built-in makes for a seamless way to transition between traditional cable programming and internet-delivered content.
This seems to be an extension of the new Amazon which doesn’t care who’s making the devices their services are on, just as long as they’re on them. We’ve seen it with the dozens of Alexa products popping up in recent months, we just didn’t have a clue whether they’d ever do the same for their Fire TV.
It makes you wonder what’s next. Will Amazon start offering their platform for phone and tablet makers, too? That’d be interesting, though it would detract from Amazon’s Kindle lineup which is one of their only hardware successes of noteworthy mention.
In any case, we have a full-blown Amazon TV, and it’ll cost you just $649.99. Look forward to its arrival on June 14th.
Buy 4K Amazon Fire TV at Amazon
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