Amazon announces revised Fire TV and Fire TV Stick

Amazon has just launched a refresh its living room line-up with a new Fire TV Stick, Fire TV box and a new Fire TV Gaming package. The battle for that little space by your TV has become even more contested.

Beginning with the Fire TV Stick, the biggest change is the introduction of Amazon’s new voice control system named Alexa. The voice control allows the user to search for shows across a variety of libraries and load up applications. Alexa is coming to existing Amazon TV boxes too, via a Fire TV OS 5 update. The Fire TV Stick comes with a dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. The new model costs $50, or you can grab the non-voice option for the old $40 price tag.

The updated Fire TV is a more powerful beast, as you might expect. Amazon is looking to one up many of its competitors with support for 4K TVs and content. Amazon claims that its new CPU is 75 percent more powerful than the old version, and there is now twice the GPU performance for gaming too.

The new Fire TV boasts a quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM and 8GB of internal memory, complete with a microSD card slot for up to 128GB of extra space. The updated model also comes with voice support and will cost $100.

Living room gaming has leapt into the spotlight again recently, so Amazon has also announced a Fire TV Gaming bundle to make use of all that extra GPU power. The package will retail for $140 and contains a Fire TV, a redesigned game controller, 32GB microSD card and and two free games: Shovel Knight and Disney’s Ducktales.

If Amazon’s new gear takes your fancy, you can already pre-order the devices. The Fire TV will ship out on October 5th and the Fire TV Stick with voice commands will be heading out on October 22nd.