Amazon Luna, new Echo speakers, Fire TV, a flying Ring drone-cam and more: Every

Amazon surprised us at its Fall Devices and Services event with its new Luna cloud-gaming service, along with the expected updates to its line of Echo, Fire TV and Ring products. The event helps Amazon generate buzz as we roll into the holiday shopping season, and for the first time, Prime Day. (The annual sale is usually held in July, but this year it is slated to start on Oct. 13.) That means putting Alexa everywhere — inside homes and out — and addressing privacy concerns, which were a big storyline in 2019 for both Ring and Alexa. In a life-at-home existence, with millions of us hunkered down for the long haul, the connected house concepts that Amazon has been developing for years have become more relevant than ever. 

The company’s Echo and Fire TV products will be its first to earn sustainability badges, and it’s working on reducing power consumption across devices with a new low-power mode and an energy dashboard integrated with Alexa. Amazon also pledged to build solar and wind farms to generate energy to match the consumption of all its devices.

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All of the announcements from Amazon’s crazy fall event

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The company launched a cloud-gaming service on top of Amazon Web Services that runs on PCs, Fire TVs and even iOS. There’s a Luna Plus game channel with a curated set of games, and Amazon is partnering with publisher Ubisoft for Day 1 availability of some of them.

It has a custom $50 controller that connects directly to the cloud rather than the local device.

Read more: Amazon gets into game streaming with Luna

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This is the custom controller that connects directly to the cloud, which Amazon says reduces roundtrip latency by 17 milliseconds to 30 ms, compared to a controller connected via Bluetooth to a PC, Mac or Fire TV.

Amazon/Screenshot by CNET

Redesigned with a new spherical shape and able to adapt to the acoustics of the room, the fourth-gen Echo incorporates features formerly in the Echo Plus. It’s also a bridge to Amazon’s Sidewalk network and includes neural network technology to accelerate…