Gadgetory

readings all this is deke Adams with pocketnow.com and today we're going to take a closer look at the software on the amazon kindle fire so sit back relax enjoy the show so when you power on the device you get the Amazon lock screen which just slides over with your finger there it does have some information on it such as the time and the date and you notice that the the screensaver there the the wallpaper and the background rotates as you turn the device on and off and unlock it back and forth moving into the primary view from which you'll use the Amazon Kindle Fire day-to-day we've got the carousel here which shows kind of all the apps that you've opened recently you can see I was in the the Nook tools here a web browser etc etc and then it also has items in here that you may not have opened recently but may have in your kindle fire or rather your amazon library available to download you can tap those items and view them if you scroll down here this is your favorites kind of bookshelf and you can add items to those bookshelves by simply tapping and holding and then you get an option here to add to favorites and then vice versa you can tap and hold on item down here and remove from favorites or remove from device content that is listed here that is not let's say we find a item here so this video here I can add it to my favorites but I can't remove them from the device because it's not actually install on device it's just something that was watched the Amazon video system across the top here we've got the newsstands which connects to the Amazons all of these items here connects to Amazon's back-end the weather to be the newsstand looks music video docs apps the web including the web because the web uses the silk browser newsstand is specifically for magazine style articles and then sorry not articles but magazines in general books are for obviously at the kindle books that you can get either purchasing them through the store here or even on the web and being able to save them and download them this device same thing with the rest of these music for music obviously video for the video you store on the device plus the video you want to use through amazon prime service it does not connect the video for netflix for example you still have to go into apps and find netflix for that docs are files that you've put on the device that our files like in my case I've put a couple of books here that are a book that I've got on the device that I've loaded as a mobi file that shows up here in the docs and then apps is the app store it shows all of your apps in that you have in the tray and then it also has these little arrowed apps here which are apps that you can download because you've already purchased them in some fashion from the Amazon store web browser which we'll come back to in a minute is the silk web browser which I really haven't found to be terribly faster than any other web browser that I've used on an Android device up here at the top if you top tap the left hand side which would unboxing we couldn't get to do anything that's because if there's not a notification up here you won't get the notification bar won't appear if you don't have something to see up here and as you can see I've downloaded the Kindle update just to show you as an example of an item for a notification and I can clear all of those and then the notification bar will pop up and it won't come back down again unless there's something else there if you tap on this side then you get your settings menu you can lock the screen orientation change the volume up and down brightness Wi-Fi forces synchronization and if you go under more then you get a pretty typical Android menu it is missing some items for example the ability to be able to change your own keyboard but there's ways around that just note that you know this is where you're going to find information like your battery life and how much storage space you have available be able to toggle on and off the ability to install apps from outside of the Amazon sources down at the bottom we've got the menu the back button and then if you're in a that uses let's say a menu then you can tap here and get your menu option as well let's go ahead and open up the browser and I can show you what that looks like so standard keyboard here for the Amazon Kindle Fire it works great too haven't had any problems with with accuracy or anything like that I'm going to type upside down here and we'll navigate to pocket now you see how fast this loads up on my Wi-Fi while the browser's loading you can see we've got an option here for adding a bookmark for this page if you like so here we are with this and feels a little bit sluggish in the scrolling it's still loading up some side items here so it's not terribly surprising there I have installed a application from the Google market that increase the sensitivity of the touch screen thus making it I'm not missing as many touches or taps when I tap on items and I find that the scrolling is a little bit better as you can see here the text is a little bit small for reading at this size if you zoom in then of course you know the text becomes easier to read scrolling up and down is fairly smooth but really I haven't found again that it's really the silk service is being very much faster than any other browser that I've used on the device you have multiple tabs by tapping the plus button at a new tab as you can see some of the other items that you've gone through then you've got the ability to close said tabs by just tapping the X for some reason when you tap the X on the last web browser it doesn't then open up a new tab it just closes the web altogether the content that's available through say video or otherwise and if you've got a prime subscription there's a lot of video content you can watch free same thing with books if you're a prime member then there are books that you can check out for free i'm just going to go in here and find one kindle owners lending library here and i'm going to say fiction and I can see the list of items here and if I want to check this book out for this month and you can only check out one book per month I could just go right here and say borrow for free and it's processing my borrow right now and I can return this book here because I'm done with it now the only problem is that you only get one per month so if you download a small short story which is what I did before in the middle of the month and you finish it in 15 minutes then you have to wait till the month cycle is over in order to be able to borrow a new book hopefully that will change in the future but for now at least it's a neat feature and then once it's downloaded then you can move right into the kindle app which I've got set here to black text or black background with white text but you have many options to change the font size the background color margins etc as you deem fit and then just tapping on the screen moves you back and forth or you can slide to scroll back and forth between pages no fancy page-turning effects here just the simple tap very quick very easy on the eyes makes it very more comfortable to be able to read on apps that don't have arch designed for the amazon kindle fire let's take for example the PV here you've got a little option down here at the bottom that allows you to tap on this little up arrow that makes it so you can access the home menu and all of the other options now I have had the occasional lock up and hiccup with this device but really it hasn't been any more different than I've had with say the any other Android tablet or android device as far as the music app is concerned you can see that you've got music on here you tap on it's a pretty straightforward simple music player nothing too fancy about it same thing with the video player there's no fancy features it has a limited capability with the type of codecs that and support at least out of box so you don't expect too much out of that feature in functionality but it does allow you to play music at least in the background while you're reading other books and then be able to control that via the upper menu that wraps up our closer look at the software on the amazon kindle fire if you have any comments or questions please leave them below give us a thumbs up if you liked the video thanks for watching you