mayday
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Amazon sunsets its live video tech support for Fire tablets
In our Fire phone review from 2014, we called Mayday one of Amazon's most brilliant features. People can use it to summon tech support advisers on their Amazon devices within seconds, after all, and those reps can help people fix whatever issue they're having through live video at the push of a button. While Amazon launched the feature with great fanfare, it's now quietly sending it to its grave: Mayday will cease working sometime this month. GeekWire has noticed a memo on Mayday's support page that says "The Mayday video calling service will be discontinued in June 2018."
Amazon's Fire phone coming to the UK as an O2 exclusive
Amazon's usually quick to stock its national sites with any new homegrown hardware, but we were reminded just how long Fire TV has been out in the States last week when the company announced its European launch. Today, we've learnt Amazon's other new(ish) device, the Fire phone, will be making a much more timely appearance in the UK. From right now, you can pre-order it exclusively through O2, with September 30th set as the delivery date. The smartphone, which first landed in the US in late July, has a bunch of unique features like 3D head-tracking, one-handed gesture controls and live, on-device customer support through Mayday. There's also Firefly, an image- and audio-based search engine that can help you find products on Amazon, translate text, extract information from business cards and similar, as well as integrate with other apps like StubHub.
Meet the Kraken in Call of Duty: Ghosts' 'Mayday' trailer
In the second episode of Call of Duty: Ghosts' Extinction storyline, our heroic human protagonists must dispatch scurrying extraterrestrials, glowing beasts and one very big, very mean alien who wrecks giant ships with the gleeful abandon of a kid playing in the tub. [Image: Activision]
PSA: Amazon's 7-inch Kindle Fire HDX now shipping
The holidays are still a ways off, but the wait is (soon to be) over. The seven-inch version of Amazon's Kindle Fire HDX just started shipping. With a starting price of $229, the slate brings a new version of Fire OS (the update formerly known as "Mojito"), a lovely 323 ppi display and, of course, some on-screen customer support in the form of MayDay. That'll help with the inevitable troubleshooting for those friends and family members who can turn the thing on, but can't figure out much else. We reviewed (and really liked) the latest addition to the Fire family earlier this month. Video evidence of that can be found after the break, just above an extremely enthusiastic press release.
