Fire Tablets For Dummies. Muir Nancy C.

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I include warnings so you can avoid any pitfalls.

      

When you see this icon, you'll know that I'm emphasizing important information for you to keep in mind as you use a feature.

      

These short words of advice draw your attention to faster, easier, or alternative ways of getting things done with Fire tablets.

      Beyond the Book

      There is extra online content about Fire tablets that goes beyond the book itself. Go online to take advantage of these features:

      ✔ 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

      

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

      ▶ 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.

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.

      

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

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