Kindle Fire: Out of the Box

Preface

Since the release of the original iPad, Apple has dominated the tablet market. With Apple’s characteristically sleek styling, attention to user experience, and marketing savvy, it’s no surprise that the field has been the iPad versus everyone else. Until now.

Though it’s been the undisputed king of tablets, the iPad is not perfect, and it inherits some baggage from the increasingly overburdened iTunes application and Store. Starting from scratch and a fresh perspective with the Fire, Amazon gets right the very few things Apple gets wrong when it comes to an intuitive media-consuming tablet. Amazon even one-upped Apple’s minimalist resistance to physical buttons. You think one Home button on the face of the device is spartan? How about no buttons! The power button (out of the way, on the bottom edge) is the only physical button to be found anywhere on the device. The Fire doesn’t even have a volume rocker, mute switch, or anything (all of these functions are handled on screen).

Whether your media library lives in your Amazon Cloud Drive or on your device, the Fire gives you immediate access to all of it, wherever you are, as long as you know where to find it and how to consume it. With Kindle Fire: Out of the Box, you’ll jump right in to reading full-color magazines, newspapers, newly enhanced ebooks, and your own personal documents. Quickly download music from your Amazon Cloud Drive or new music from the Amazon MP3 store to listen offline, and get instant, unlimited access to streaming of over 10,000 popular movies and TV shows. And go beyond your own media to experience integrated email, games, Android apps from the Amazon App Store, and ultra-fast web browsing with the revolutionary, cloud-accelerated Silk browser.

This intuitive, easy-to-follow ebook opens the world of possibilities made possible by the Kindle Fire, right out of the box.

About This Book

When you open the box for your brand-new Kindle Fire, you’ll find the hottest 7-inch tablet to hit the market, a power adapter, and a “Quick Start Guide” that tells you how to turn it on. But to really take advantage of all the content and features the device has to offer, you’ll need a little more. Kindle Fire: Out of the Box will get you up and running beyond the first “slide to unlock” screen to unlock all of your media from the cloud in the palm of your hand.

About→These→Arrows

Throughout this book, you’ll find sentences like this: “Open the View→Column Browser→On Top” menu. That’s shorthand for a longer series of instructions that goes something like this: “Go to the menu bar in iTunes, click the View menu, select the Column Browser submenu, and then slide over to the On Top entry.” Our shorthand system helps keep things snappier than a set of long, drawn-out instructions would.

About the Notes

To call attention to something particularly useful or worth watching out for, the book uses notes like these:

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