Amazon takes Apple TV head-on with refreshed Fire TV including $140 Gaming Edition

With Apple TV due in late October, Amazon has moved to refresh its similar Fire TV offering with new hardware.

Retailing at $100 and due out on 5 October, Amazon claims this has 75% more processing power and twice the GPU performance of the original box.

Particularly interesting is the announcement of a hardware bundle it's calling Fire TV Gaming Edition.

Priced at $140, this features a Fire TV microconsole, a newly designed game controller, 32MB microSD card and two platform games, Shovel Knight and Disney's Ducktales.

The new controller, which includes a new design, audio jack and voice search, can also be purchased separately for $50.

Fire in the pocket

The company has also taken the opportunity to refresh its Fire HD tablets.

Shipping on 30 September, the new 7.7mm-thin versions come in 8-inch ($150) and 10.1-inch ($230) versions, with Amazon claiming they are twice as durable as an iPad Air.

Running Fire OS 5 (called Bellini), they will also be the first of Amazon's hardware to come with its new Underground store embedded; it's part of the OS.

Amazon Underground provides free games to consumers, with developers being paid $0.002 per minute spent playing their games.

"Fire HD combines an incredibly thin and light design with powerful performance to deliver the best entertainment experience available on a tablet," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO.

"A beautiful widescreen HD display, fast quad-core processor, expandable storage, Fire OS 5, exclusive features, and the Amazon content ecosystem of more than 38 million movies, TV shows, songs, books, apps, and games."