Amazon’s Most Trendsetting Gadgets over the Years

Right now, Amazon places at my fingertips the kind of convenience that I couldn’t have imagined some years ago. I can think of a thing I want and within minutes I can have placed an order for it and then have it conveniently home delivered in mere days. But Amazon is more than just a reseller and distributor for entertainment content. Over the years, it has given us some truly trendsetting gadgets as well:

Back in the day, when the eBook reader was first launched in 2007, it was big and clunky and had these weird slanted keys and not very much storage. Now the Kindle is a sleek, smart versatile gadget that is halfway to a tablet; with the ability to carry one's entire library on the go. Now in its 10^th generation, Kindle can now hold thousands of books, has a battery that lasts weeks, has a built-in light, looks like real paper, can be read in direct sunlight. You can change the text size, translate words, look up definitions and highlight words without leaving the page.

We all suddenly had all this online content that we could stream and it didn’t seem a lot of fun to watch on a small phone screen. Equally, we didn’t want to get rid of the perfectly adequate TV we had which we hadn’t bought too long ago. Along came the perfect compromise: Amazon’s Fire Stick which turned our TVs into Smart TVs for a fraction of the cost. Each subsequent generation added refinements and made the gadget more user friendly and feature-rich.

This is not just a gadget but a virtual assistant that is Amazon's answer to Siri and Google assistant. You can speak to Alexa and ask it to give you information, find a song and play it for you. Ask a question, get a response – it was being called conversational computing. Now, of course, this is par for the course, but when Alexa was first launched, it seemed pretty darn marvellous. It was the sort of things people showed off to visitors to their home much like the cute, precocious kid being made to recite a nursery rhyme for the visiting uncles and aunties. And this inspired other manufacturers to put Alexa into their own products: alarm clocks, microwaves, headphones and even showerheads.

For a while, there was Echo Look that could take handsfree photos and apparently also tell us what to wear. Now Echo can be used with the Alexa based communication platform for a range of options. Not this smart speaker produces amazing sound for music and works with all popular music streaming services and also helps you control ACs, TVs, water heaters, and smart lights in the home. Ask for scores, the weather, the news and stories and receive answers. So Amazon not only gave us the gadgets we didn’t know we wanted, those gadgets became trendsetters. They made other manufacturers work to give us smarter, more feature-rich gadgets.