Fire Tablets For Dummies. Muir Nancy C.

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 the devices without your having to lift a finger. (See Chapter 8 for details on notes, bookmarking, and more features of the ereader.)

      Immersion Reading is a feature that uses Whispersync to allow you to play an audiobook and have the current word that’s being spoken highlighted in the text. This feature supposedly aids in reader retention, so it might be a nice match for those late-night study sessions with textbooks.

Using content libraries

      As I state earlier, the Fire tablet is meant to be a device you use to consume media, meaning that you can use it to play/read all kinds of music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, and newspapers. Amazon has built up a huge amount of content, from print (see Figure 1-4) to audio books via its subsidiary Audible (more than 22 million) to movies, TV shows, songs, books, magazines, audiobooks, apps, and games. Count on these numbers to have risen by the time you read this: Amazon continues to rack up deals with media groups such as Fox Broadcasting and PBS to make even more content available on a regular basis.

      Tap a library – such as Books, Music, or Videos – on the Fire tablet Home screen, and you can find various kinds of content in the AmazonStore – by tapping the Store button. Tap Newsstand to shop for periodicals (see Figure 1-5) and Music to shop for songs and albums; tap Video and you go directly to the Amazon Video Store. Tap Apps to shop the Amazon Appstore. If you download content, it’s contained in one of these libraries, which have tabs to display content on the device, and you can read or play it even if you’re not connected to the Internet. All the content you purchase is backed up on the Amazon Cloud Drive automatically.

      Figure 1-4: The Kindle Bookstore offers more than 1 million books for the Kindle ereader app.

      Another form of content that you get for free is the information contained in the IMDb, a database owned by Amazon. This information is used by the X-Ray feature to show you information about actors and characters in videos, song lyrics in music, and characters or other information referenced in books.

      When you own a Fire tablet and have a Prime account, you can take advantage of the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library, where you can choose from more than 200,000 books to borrow at no charge for as long as you like. If you have an Amazon Prime membership, you can also get one free book a month for your permanent library.

      

If you’re concerned about kids who access content over a Fire tablet, check out the limitations you can place using the parental controls (see Chapter 5) or buy them their own Kids Edition of Fire for even more control over their content.

      See Chapter 6 for more about buying content and apps for your Fire tablet.

      Figure 1-5: Amazon’s magazine selection is constantly growing.

Browsing with Amazon Silk

      Silk is the Internet browser for Fire tablets (see Figure 1-6). Silk is simple to use, but the real benefits of Amazon Silk are all about browsing performance.

      Figure 1-6: Amazon Silk offers simple-to-use browsing tools.

      Amazon Silk is touted as a “Cloud-accelerated split browser.” In plain English, this means that the browser can use the power of Amazon’s servers to load the pages of a website quickly. Because parts of the process of loading web pages are handled not on your Fire tablet but on servers in the Cloud, your pages should display faster.

      In addition, you get what’s called a persistent connection, which means that your tablet is always connected to the Amazon Internet backbone (the routes that data travels to move among networks online) whenever it has access to a Wi-Fi connection.