Amazon Black Friday deals live: millions of discounts to launch at 12:01 PST tonight

A Black Friday classic: Echo Dot for $24.99

Let’s get warmed up with a classic Black Friday bargain. Amazon has cut the price of its latest Echo Dot by 50% – dropping the price to $24.99.

Amazon only released the new Echo Dot 5th Gen at the end of September, and this is the first time the new smart speaker has been on sale. We’ve not reviewed it yet, but according to Amazon it has improved audio – specifically, up to 50% less distorting, and yet up to twice the bass at the same time – as we reported at the time.

Right now, it costs the same as the excellent fourth-gen version, which we awarded 4.5/5 stars in our Echo Dot 4th-gen review, so we’d go for the newer model. If you’re not sure where to start with smart home tech, here’s your answer.

Welcome to our coverage of the Amazon Black Friday sale

Thanks for joining us this morning. 

Hold on, you may be thinking, haven’t there been Black Friday deals at Amazon for the majority of November already? It’s true, the retailer has had early offers for a few weeks, but tomorrow marks the true start of the Amazon Black Friday sale.

Whether it makes that big a difference remains to be seen, but Amazon has said the event will run for 48 hours across November 24 and 25. Thousands of new offers are set to go live – including a selection of limited-time lightning deals every 30 minutes.

These include price cuts of up to 70% on Amazon’s own smart home devices, coffee machines, toys, appliances, Samsung, HP, Dell, Bose and Xbox – as well as a brand new Nintendo Switch bundle.

Stay tuned for regular updates on some of the best early deals in the run-up and then we’ll share our top picks from the fresh batch of Amazon offers once they go live at midnight. Whatever they may be.