✔ Cheat Sheet (www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/firetablets): The Cheat Sheet for this book includes a table of information about all the Quick Settings available to you, including settings to adjust screen brightness and the new Mayday online support button.
✔ Dummies.com online articles: The parts pages of this book provide links to articles on Dummies.com that extend the content covered in the book. The articles appear on the book's Extras page at www.dummies.com/extras/firetablets. Topics include staying safe online, getting more out of OfficeSuite, and ten great apps for kids.
✔ Updates: Here's where you can find updates in case the book changes substantially: www.dummies.com/extras/firetablets.
Where to Go from Here
Time to get that Fire out of its box, set it up, and get going with all the fun, entertaining things it makes available to you. Have fun!
Part I
Getting Started with Fire Tablets
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
▶ Discovering what’s new in the latest Fire tablets
▶ Comparing Fire tablets to the competition
▶ 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.
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