- Amazon has sent out invites for a big new hardware launch
- It’s taking place on September 30 in New York, USA
- The teaser suggests we’ll see new Echo speakers, Kindles and more
Amazon has just announced its own Apple-style event for later this month, where we’ll likely see it launch new Echo smart speakers, Echo Bud earphones, a new Kindle and more.
The launch will take place on September 30 in New York City with exact timings to be confirmed. But the invitation (above) has given us some good pointers on the new products we’ll likely see revealed.
Amazon’s last big consumer event was for its new Alexa+ subscription service on February 26 and this September launch will likely give us several new bits of hardware that will all play nice with its revamped voice assistant.
So what exactly does Amazon have in store? We’ve run our magnifying glass over the invite above to give you our best guesses below.
Amazon’s invite dissected – what to expect
1. A new Amazon Echo Studio smart speaker
The upper-right quadrant of Amazon’s invite looks very much like a smart speaker – possibly a new Amazon Echo Studio. This would be a long-overdue update; the original Echo Studio launched in 2022, and although it still holds a place in our roundup of the best smart speakers, there’s plenty of room for improvement.
This speaker’s main selling point will likely be Alexa+. It took months for the AI-powered assistant to arrive on Echo Show devices, but hopefully Amazon has ironed out the kinks and Alexa+ will be available on the new Studio from day one.
This will necessitate a big upgrade to the speaker’s silicon, and I’m also hoping this will result in improved 3D audio, which was quite a mixed bag with the original Studio.
2. A new color Kindle
That bottom-right hand segment of the invite is easily the most straightforward part of the teaser, showing off what seems to be some kind of new color Kindle.
With the Kindle Colorsoft out in the wild (and some early teething problems with its screen resolved) it’s about time that Amazon expanded its color line-up, so a new model makes a lot of sense.
It might just be the perspective, but the screen appears bigger than that of the Colorsoft, with much thinner bezels to our eyes – closer to the look of the existing Kindle Scribe.
The slither of text in the corner of the image is interesting too: “with the […] stroke of a pen”. Could this just be a coincidence, or a little hint that this upcoming device will offer stylus functionality?
We’ll have to wait and see whether the Scribe is about to get a colorful refresh, but it’s our most firm prediction right now.
3. Some new Amazon Echo Buds (2025)
It makes sense: the original Amazon Echo Buds landed in 2019; the second-gen setarrived in 2021; the most recent Amazon Echo Buds (2023) hit shelves in (you guessed it) 2023 and here we are, in 2025.
To date, Amazon’s Echo Buds products have proved solid but unspectacular performers under intense review, gaining four-stars and not a half-star more in the six years since they joined the market.
What needs to change – if indeed this is the glowing top plate of a fourth-gen. earpiece we see before us? Well, the price-tag has never been an issue, but more energy and impact through the bass would be our top request; less fiddly on-ear controls would be second.
Oh, and active noise cancellation really is becoming a must-have in 2025, so that’d be third.
One other thought: is hands-free Alexa the earbuds USP it once was? Not with ChatGPT available in even Nothing’s most affordable earbuds, plus Gemini arriving on the Galaxy Buds 3 Pro, with more Samsung and Sony earbuds to follow, we’d wager. So, it’ll be interesting to see how Amazon proceeds…
4. New Amazon Fire TVs or a Fire tablet
The bottom-left corner of the invite shows a TV screen or display with a bezel, which suggests a couple of possibilities.
The most likely one is that Amazon is preparing a fresh range of Fire TV sets. Its lineup currently has a few options, led by the Amazon Fire TV Omni QLED (which our review branded “one of the best-featured cheap 4K TVs you can buy” when it landed back in 2023).
Below that is the Fire TV 4-series and the entry-level 2-series, which also arrived in 2023. Our Amazon Fire TV 32-inch 2-series review didn’t exactly sing its praises, but did conclude that it’s a “functional TV at a budget-friendly price”.
Beyond TV sets, we could instead get a new Fire tablet, though this seems less likely. Last month, some compelling rumors predicted that Amazon was planning to revamp its Fire tablet range by replacing Fire OS with Android. That would be a big deal, but the rumor from Reuters suggested this wouldn’t be happening until 2026.
The final Fire TV possibility is, of course, new Fire TV Sticks. Rumors earlier this year predicted that Amazon could switch to a new operating system (Vega OS) for its little streaming sticks in 2025, which would likely prove controversial. It isn’t yet clear if that also means new hardware, but we’ll likely find out at Amazon’s event.
5. Some surprises – Echo Frames and Echo Auto 3?
Beyond new Echo speakers, Echo Buds, Kindles and Fire TV hardware, Amazon has a range of other tech that it’s kept on simmer – could any of these be updated at its September 30 event?
The Amazon Echo Auto 2 – an in-car microphone that lets you talk to Alexa – landed way back in 2022 and is now unavailable, so it’s long overdue an update. Could Amazon be prepping a version that runs its new Alexa+ assistant?
It’s also likely to be a big week for smart glasses, with Meta Connect 2025 kicking off on September 17. Could Amazon respond with an update to its Amazon Echo Frames (Gen 3), which have snuck into our guide to the best smart glasses?
Amazon’s hardware events have traditionally been a blizzard of new announcements, so all of the above are possible. We’ll be bringing you all of the news live, so make sure to return to TechRadar in a couple of weeks for the full rundown.
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mark.wilson@futurenet.com (Mark Wilson)
