✔ 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.
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✔ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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