We had high hopes for the long-rumoured Amazon Echo with a touchscreen, but those hopes were absolutely shattered
Recently rumours have been flying around the internet that claims Amazon is planning to release a new member of its Echo connected speaker family which would include a touchscreen. An image of what that product may look like has been uncovered on Amazon’s site.
A new image of the hideous device that is purportedly the new Amazon Echo with a built-in touchscreen has been discovered by the site AFTVnews, who has recently become somewhat of a source for supposed Amazon hardware leaks. The product looks like an old Philco Predicta without any of the appealing parts. It basically looks like someone ripped a backseat TV out of a minivan and slapped it on a table. You’re buying a big square box made to invade your family’s privacy at all hours. Fun!
The site says this is the Amazon Echo with a touchscreen that has been rumored since it was first reported by Bloomberg in November. It also says it found the tiny photo on Amazon’s servers.
This isn’t the first time the site has claimed to find new Amazon hardware before it’s officially released. “One of my scripts that regularly crawls various sites, in hopes of finding information about upcoming hardware, found the image you see above sitting on Amazon.com,” the site wrote in a blog post about the Echo Look prior to that product’s official launch. The site says it used a similar method to find this new photograph.
As per the reports by CNET the new Amazon Echo with a touchscreen would be launched later this month. The last time AFTVnews found images of an unreleased product, it was shortly before the product was officially released. Hence it might give us some reason to think this new photo could be legit.
Unfortunately, not much is known about the device. Rumors suggest that it will have a camera on the front. This might enable many of the same features available in the Echo Look. We also suspect that the speakers will be of a higher quality than the first-generation device. Our best guess is that the touchscreen will be used to serve up info (like the weather) at a glance, but it’s easy to imagine developers using it for all sorts of new purposes.
