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Amazon’s Redesigned Tablets Come with Panic Button

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Amazon’s new line of Fire HDX tablets features a bunch of hardware enhancements, but more importantly, they come with a tiny helper when you’re suffering from technical woes.

The redesigned tablets, both the 7-inch and the 8.9 inch tablet, are powered by 2.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, which are three times faster than the previous processors of the Kindle Fires. Also the RAM has been doubled to 2GB. The OS, now known as the Fire OS, will also come with more user-friendly features like the ability to download Amazon Prime Instant TV shows and movies directly to the tablet. For those who want to take their Kindle Fire HDX to work, the OS will support new enterprise-friendly features such as updated email with threaded messages, support for wireless printing, VPN integration and support for encryption.

However, it is the so-called Mayday button that will make Amazon really stand out in an increasingly crowded tablet market. Whenever you are suffering from technical problems, this new support feature will put a tiny video of an Amazon tech-support employee on the tablet screen within 15-seconds of your request. Whilst helping you, they can even see and draw directly on your tablet if you allow them to.

Amazon still roughly breaks even on the sale of its Kindle Fire tablets, as selling hardware is just a side business for Amazon. “We want to make money when people use our devices, not when people buy our devices.” said Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos. “That’s why we sell our devices at roughly break-even on the hardware. And then, when people use the devices, buying books or music or videos and so on, that’s where we have an opportunity to make money.”

In order to keep people using those devices, Amazon is training and hiring thousands of people to ensure that it’s ready for an onslaught of support calls. “We’ll be ready for Christmas morning, which is always a very big tech support day for us,” Bezos said. However, all of those employees will not only be helping tablet users, they will also be logging every question, problem, and issue that gets thrown their way. This will be valuable data for Amazon to determine if something in the OS needs to be adjusted in the next update.

With this free, 24/7 and 365-days-a-year tech support, Amazon is stepping up its game as a consumer- and retail-focused company. This could revolutionise the way tech support is handled on mobile devices, as this might be the perfect solution many other consumer-facing companies have been waiting for. If the trend catches on, it will certainly give more people the chance to work in IT in the already buoyant market for tech support jobs.

The redesigned Kindle Fire HDX comes in the same 7-inch and 8.9-inch configurations as the previous Kindle Fire tablets. Both models are available for pre-order now, with the 7-inch shipping from November 14, and the 8.9-inch shipping from December 10.

Image source: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DOPNO4M

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