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Technology

Amazon’s Greatest Gadget Hits in the Bezos Era: Kindle, Echo, and More

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This isn’t hardware, per se, but Alexa has proven to be one of Amazon’s biggest moves in the consumer product space. And the now-ubiquitous voice assistant debuted inside the first Echo speaker. It came along a full five years after Siri, but on arrival Alexa was markedly more useful and fun than Apple’s own voice assistant because it could reach much further into the internet’s knowledge banks.

The first Echo speaker is also the device that made Alexa a household name and brought conversational computing to the masses. Ask a question, get a response? It seemed novel at the time, but it also clearly pointed to the future. And it became the future quite rapidly after Amazon began pumping out dozens of Echo variants and licensing the voice tech in ways that allowed other hardware manufacturers to put Alexa into their own speakers … and alarm clocks, light bulbs, shower heads, microwaves, headphones, and smart watches. Sure, Alexa’s limitations as a conversation partner make it feel gimmicky even today, but the types of computing interactions Alexa popularized now seem completely normal. We just talk to our computers these days! No biggie.

2017: Echo Look

In April 2017, Amazon revealed what was perhaps its most bizarre gadget at that time: the Echo Look, a phallic smart camera with a four-microphone array that would snap hands-free photos of your outfits and tell you what to wear. This is not a joke. The camera was available only by invitation, though one of WIRED’s writers managed to buy one off eBay and review it for another publication at the time.

Ultimately, the Echo Look gave us a glimpse at our computer-vision futures. It used machine learning to make recommendations, like so many consumer products do these days, but it also got a lot of those “personalized” suggestions wrong and alarmed privacy advocates. In the spring of 2020, Amazon said it would discontinue the Echo Look and the camera would no longer function starting July 2020.

2017–2020: Echo … Everything

Here we break from our regular chronology. On a sunny Seattle morning in late September 2017, the tech press gathered at Amazon’s headquarters for … well, we didn’t know what to expect. Amazon, it turns out, had decided to join its tech brethren in hosting an official hardware launch. That day, and again in subsequent years, Amazon vomited up an uncountable number of new products (both hardware and software).

We’ve attempted to list a few key products here: Echo Plus; a shorter, fatter Echo; Echo Spot; Echo Buttons; Echo Connect; a Big Mouth Billy Bass with Alexa (again, this is not a joke); Echo Auto; Echo Sub; Echo Wall Clock; Amazon Basics Microwave (more on Amazon’s kitchen appliances below); Echo Link; Fire TV Recast; Ring Stick-Up Cam; Echo Dot Kids; new Eero routers; Ring Car Alarm, Car Cam, and Car Connect; a spherical Echo; and a cloud gaming service called Luna. Did we forget anything? Just kidding. We definitely did.

2017: Echo Show

One of the products that arrived on that September day in 2017 was the first Echo Show. It was a “smart display,” essentially a small tablet-like screen with speakers for playing music, a microphone for capturing your Alexa commands, and a camera for … wait, what was the camera for? For use with a new Alexa-based communication platform, which let people send audio, video, and texts to anyone with an Alexa device or the Alexa app on their phones.

That chat service didn’t really take off, and all the camera did was skeeze people out. The Echo Show did succeed in showing how much more useful Alexa could be when it was built into a dedicated touchscreen. Smart displays became a hit. Google made its own version that worked with its Google Assistant, and both companies licensed the tech to other hardware makers who helped these countertop devices proliferate. Thankfully, there are plenty of options out there today that come with camera shutoff switches.

2018: Ring

Photograph: Amazon

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Science

How to Fix a Water-Damaged Smartphone

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It fell in the toilet. Your clumsy partner knocked a glass of water onto it. You forgot it was in your pocket when you jumped into the pool. That’s just a few of the hundreds of ways your phone could come into life-threatening contact with liquid.

Fortunately, waterproofing has become mostly standard on modern phones. New iPhones, Samsung Galaxy devices, and Google’s newest Pixel phones all feature some degree of water resistance or waterproofing. How well a phone resists water is measured on an IP (or Ingress Protection) scale. If your phone is rated with a high number, like IP67 or IP68 protection, congratulations, it’s probably going to be fine! But if it’s got a lower rating, or none at all, you should prepare for the worst before you start chilling in the hot tub with your trusty Sidekick.

So when your phone decides to take a dive, as soon as you’re done freaking out, you’ll probably begin frantically tapping all the buttons, blowing on it, or blasting it with a hair dryer to quickly get rid of all that water. While those are all well-meaning actions, guess what? Totally the wrong approach. Here’s the right way to rescue your water-damaged smartphone.

First, retrieve it as quickly as possible. If your phone is still in the bottom of the jacuzzi or the toilet, get it out ASAP. The longer it’s in the liquid, the greater the likelihood of damage will be.

Once the device is no longer submerged, power it off right away. Don’t try to press any of the other buttons or load any apps, just switch it off. Remove the case if you have one. If you have a phone with a removable battery, pop the battery out. You want to cut off power in the device as quickly as possible to prevent the possibility of a short circuit. Most of today’s smartphones don’t have removable batteries, but some older models, or new models built with repairability in mind like the Nokia 1.3, let you pop the battery out.

Do not blow-dry your wet phone or stick it in the oven! Heat can damage the delicate electronics inside. What you should do is give the naked, case-free phone a quick wipe with a clean towel, making sure no water accidentally ends up draining into its charging port, SIM or MicroSD slots, or headphone jack (if your phone still has one). If there are traces of water trapped inside cracks or indentations in the case, try carefully and conservatively using compressed air to blow it out. If you don’t have a can of air lying around, you can use your mouth to gently blow it out. Just be careful not to blow the water further inside the phone, or add any of your own spit to the mix.

Next we have a few different options. If you search the internet or ask a friend, a common piece of advice you’ll hear is to stuff your device in a bag of rice. It does often work in a pinch, but that method can cause some problems. While rice is absorbent, it’s incapable of collecting all the moisture hidden deep within your phone, so it only serves as a partial fix. Also, the rice gets mushy and sticky as it absorbs the water, and then you could wind up with gummy bits of rice stuck in your phone’s seams and ports. To be safe, wrap the phone loosely in a paper towel before dropping it into the rice.



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