Fire Tablets For Dummies

Getting Started with Fire Tablets

webextras.eps Visit www.dummies.com for more great Dummies content online.

In this part …

Take a look at your Fire tablet.

Turn it on and set it up for first use.

Read about how to use the touchscreen.

Set up profiles for yourself and your children.

Chapter 1

Getting an Overview of Fire Tablets

In This Chapter

arrow Discovering what’s new in the latest Fire tablets

arrow Comparing Fire tablets to the competition

arrow Surveying all of the Fire tablet’s features

Your Fire tablet isn’t just an ereader. It’s a handheld computer with a touchscreen and an onscreen keyboard for providing input, and with apps that allow you to play games, read ebooks, check email, browse the web, watch movies, listen to music, and more.

Amazon, the giant online retailer, just happens to have access to more content (music, movies, audio books, and so on) than just about anybody on the planet. So, when an Amazon tablet debuted a few years ago, and as Amazon stacked up media partnerships with the likes of Fox and PBS, the Kindle Fire tablet was seen as the first real challenge to Apple’s iPad.

Now, in its fourth generation and rebranded as simply Fire, these four tablet models offer very nice improvements at the right price and feature mix for many people, while offering the key to that treasure chest of content that Amazon has been wise enough to amass.

In this chapter, you get an overview of the four Fire tablets: how they compare to competing devices and what their key features are. Subsequent chapters delve into how to use all those features in detail.

Checking Out the Four Fire Tablet Models

In 2014, Amazon introduced four Fire tablet models that offer slightly different features and pricing, including a Fire HD Kids edition, which comes in a 6-inch or 7-inch display.

Essentially, the 8.9-inch Fire tablet sports a faster processor, higher resolution screen, higher-end cameras, the most current Wi-Fi standard, and Dolby Atmos multidimensional sound (which means when wearing headphones you hear sounds from multiple locations, as you might in a movie theater). In addition, the Kids edition has a rugged casing, two-year replacement warranty, robust parental controls, and a free year of access to Amazon’s FreeTime Unlimited with age-appropriate content.

Other than these major differences, all the models include

Unlimited Amazon Cloud storage for photos taken with your Fire model or content bought from Amazon.

An integrated app to work with Microsoft Office documents.

A free month of Amazon Prime, which provides free two-day shipping for many Amazon products, as well as access to a treasure trove of free products (video, music, and books).

X-Ray provides background information about artists, movies, musicians, and more when you’re looking up or playing content.

Table 1-1 helps you make sense of the differences among the various models.

tip.eps In addition to these four models, Amazon offers the 2013 Fire HDX 7-inch tablet for $179. This is essentially last year’s model, but it includes the Mayday help feature, a 2.2 GHz processor, and 1920 x 1200 display resolution, which is better than the newer 6- and 7-inch Fire models for not much more money.

tip.eps If you prefer working with your Fire tablet on a stand rather than holding it in your hands, check out Meb’s Kitchenwares (http://www.mebskitchenwares.com/accessories.html) to view their lovely handmade wooden tablet stand. It’s portable, handcrafted from cherry wood, and at only $70 is a beautiful piece of furniture for your Fire tablet. Note it works best with the larger versions of the tablet and works in both portrait and landscape orientations.

What’s New in the Latest Fire Tablets

Fire tablets with their new operating system, Fire OS 4.1.1, bring several new or improved features to the table:

Firefly: A feature that was announced as coming soon at the time of this writing, Firefly is essentially a text-recognition app that allows 8.9-inch Fire tablets to identify text on movie posters, music albums, and so on. Firefly finds matches for the movie, music, or whatever in Amazon’s huge online store. See Chapter 3 for more about Firefly. Updates will be posted at www.dummies.com/extras/firetablets.

Profiles: You can create profiles for different people using your tablet so each has his own settings and content. This feature is like providing unique tablets for all the people in your family, including kids. See Chapter 5 for information about setting up profiles.

Family Library: This new feature has also been announced but isn’t yet available for Fire tablets as of this writing. Family Library allows you to link accounts to share content among a group or family members without sharing a tablet. See Chapter 5 for details about Family Library. Updates will be posted at www.dummies.com/extras/firetablets.

ASAP: ASAP stands for Advanced Streaming and Prediction. Essentially, this feature allows your tablet to anticipate content you might want to watch, like your favorite TV show, and pre-load it for faster streaming. You don’t have to do a thing to use this feature; just know it’s working for you.

WPS Office: Amazon made a change in the latest Fire tablets from OfficeSuite to WPS Office. WPS Office is more integrated into Fire and allows you to create, open, and work with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files as well as a few other file formats. The working experience with documents is somehow more intuitive and simpler than in OfficeSuite. See Chapter 12 for more details about working with WPS Office.

Fire keyboard: For the 8.9-inch model only, you can buy a keyboard accessory that attaches to your Fire tablet, making it possible to work on it comfortably as well as using it to view or listen to content like books, music, and videos.

Support for 802.11 ac Wi-Fi standard: The 8.9-inch Fire has added support for the latest Wi-Fi standard, 802.11 ac. This makes your connection to Wi-Fi networks that much faster.

Second Screen: This feature allows you to fling content from Amazon Cloud to your television. This causes the content to stream to the TV so that your Fire tablet is freed up (so you can do other things with it while watching your TV). You can even explore X-Ray information about the content on your tablet while it plays on your TV. Chapter 10 tells you how to set up and use Second Screen.

tip.eps FreeTime Unlimited: This feature, which comes free for one year with the latest Kids Edition Fire tablet, lets you create a unique environment by limiting what content and apps they can use. When you turn on FreeTime, your kids see only the content you’ve given them permission to use, and it’s all shown against a kid-friendly graphical background. See Chapter 5 for more about FreeTime.

Integrated Goodreads: This service is like a social network for readers. Goodreads was available as an app in previous Amazon tablets, but with the latest models this feature is more integrated. Goodreads allows you to track and share what you’re reading and get access to reviews and recommendations from other readers via your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

SmartSuspend: This is a battery setting that, when turned on in Power Management Settings, turns off your wireless connection when you’re not using your Fire tablet. You can even set up a schedule for SmartSuspend to kick in. See Chapter 4 for the details on these settings.

Dynamic Light Control (DLC): This feature, only available on the 8.9-inch Fire model, modifies your screen when reading ebooks to match ambient light. DLC produces a more paperlike background.

Key Features of Fire Tablets

Every Fire tablet has all the things most people want from a tablet packed into an easy-to-hold package: email, web browsing, players for video and music content, built-in calendar and contacts apps, an ereader, a great online content store, access to tens of thousands of Android apps, and so on. In the following sections, you get to explore some of these useful features.

Storage on Earth and in the Cloud

Fire tablet offers 8GB of storage in its 6- and 7-inch models, and 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB in the 8.9-inch models. Any storage amount will probably work just fine for you because when you own a Fire tablet, you get free, unlimited Amazon Cloud Drive storage for all digital content purchased from Amazon (but not content that you copy onto your Fire tablet from your computer by connecting a micro USB cable). This means that books, movies, music, and apps are held online for you to stream or download at any time you have access to Wi-Fi, instead of being stored on your Fire tablet.

This Amazon Cloud Drive storage means that you don’t use up your Fire tablet memory. With the latest Fire tablets, you get unlimited Amazon Cloud storage for photos you take with the tablets and content you buy from Amazon.

As long as you have a Wi-Fi connection, you can stream content from Amazon Cloud at any time. If you’ll be away from a connection, download an item (such as an episode of your favorite TV show), watch it, and then remove it from your device the next time you’re within range of a Wi-Fi network. The content is still available in the Cloud: You can download that content again or stream it anytime you like.

tip.eps If you want to go whole hog into your Fire tablet, you can opt for the highest memory device, the 64GB 8.9-inch Fire tablet 4G LTE Wireless version of the device. Just be aware that 4G devices come with the added cost of an AT&T or Verizon data plan.

App appeal

Your Fire tablet is generally easy to use, with a simple, Android-based touchscreen interface. Its primary focus is on consuming media — and consuming media is what Amazon is all about. Fire tablet also offers its own Silk browser; an email client; clock, calendar and contact apps; and an available Skype app, as well as the Kindle ereader (see Figure 1-1). In addition, the WPS Office productivity app is built in and allows you to work with word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation documents.

tip.eps Just because a particular type of app doesn’t come preinstalled on your Fire tablet doesn’t mean you can’t get one — you can, and often for free.

At this point, the selection of apps available for Android devices isn’t nearly as robust as those available for Apple devices, but that is changing. See Chapter 14 for a list of ten or so apps that can flesh out your Fire tablet with popular features such as a budget tracker, games, weather reporter, and drawing app.

Preinstalled functionality

Here’s a rundown of the functionality you get out of the box from preinstalled apps:

Ereader to read both books and periodicals

Music player

Video player

Audiobook player

Contacts app

Calendar app

Clock app

Docs document reader for Word, PDF, RTF, and HTML format files

Silk web browser

Camera and Photos (see Figure 1-2) in which you can view and make edits (such as rotate, change brightness and adjust for red-eye, and crop) to photos

Email client, to set up the Fire tablet to access your existing email accounts

Integration for Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter

WPS Office for simple word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet functionality

Figure 1-1: Where it all started, with Kindle ereader functionality.

Figure 1-2: Use the Photos app to view photos and edit them.

tip.eps Check out the apps stored in the Cloud (meaning that these apps are stored at Amazon, rather than being preinstalled on your device) by tapping Apps on the Home screen and then tapping the Cloud tab. Here, you may find a number of free apps, such as a Wifi Analyzer (to check your Wi-Fi connection), free games, and more.

Here are some of the things you can use your Fire tablet for:

Shopping at Amazon for music, video, apps, books, and periodicals, and viewing or playing that content, covered in Chapter 6.

Storing Amazon-purchased content in the Amazon Cloud Drive and playing music and video selections from the Cloud instead of downloading them to your device. Amazon content doesn’t count toward your Amazon Cloud Drive storage limit (20GB), but other content backed up there does. Note that you can go to www.amazon.com/clouddrive and purchase anywhere from 20GB for $10 a year up to 1000GB of storage for $500.

Sending documents to yourself at a Kindle email address that’s assigned when you register your device (see Chapter 4 for more about setting up your Fire tablet, and Chapter 12 for more about using your Kindle email address to send documents to your Fire tablet).

Sideloading (transferring) content from your computer to your Fire tablet by using a micro USB cable that comes with the tablet. Using this cable (see Figure 1-3), you can copy photos, music, videos, and documents (Word or PDF) from any computer onto your Fire tablet. See Chapters 6 and 8 for more about ways to get content onto your Fire.

Making video calls using the free Skype for the Fire tablet app.

Flinging movies from your device to your large-screen TV using the Second Screen feature.

Figure 1-3: The Fire’s micro USB cable and a power adapter.

The magic of Whispersync

If you’ve ever owned a Kindle ereader, you know that downloading Amazon content to it has always been seamless. All you need for this process is access to a Wi-Fi or 4G network. Then you simply order a book, music, or a video, and within moments, it appears on your Kindle device.

The Fire tablet enjoys the same kind of easy download capability for books, audiobooks, music, video, and periodicals.

Whispersync helps sync items such as bookmarks you’ve placed in ebooks or the last place you watched in a video across various devices. For example, say you have the Kindle ereader app on your Fire tablet, PC, and smartphone. Wherever you left off reading, whatever notes you entered, and whatever pages you’ve bookmarked will be synced among all