// THE VERGE — MOBILE & WEB
Amazon is phasing out Fire Tablets because they weren’t ‘giving customers what they were asking for’
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Panos Panay says there are more hardware announcements coming, but don’t expect an Amazon laptop.
Panos Panay says there are more hardware announcements coming, but don’t expect an Amazon laptop.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Amazon’s head of consumer electronics, Panos Panay, confirmed the company would phase out the Fire brand in favor of Alexa Tablets.
The new lineup runs proper Android, instead of the custom Fire OS, and has full access to the Play Store, which wasn’t available on Fire tablets. To make matters worse, Gmail, Google Calendar, YouTube, Google Drive, and other services were only available via the browser on Fire tablets; the official Google apps were not available in the Amazon Appstore.
The Fire tablet line “wasn’t giving customers what they were asking for,” Panay told Bloomberg, which appears to be access to Google services, higher-quality hardware, and less in-your-face advertising on the lock screen. Amazon will still provide security updates for Fire tablets. “We won’t leave any customer behind,” Panay said. But don’t expect any hardware refreshes.