Fire Phone: Out of the Box

Chapter 1. Getting Around the Fire

While the complete operation of every screen and action available on the Fire phone is beyond the scope of this small getting-started guide to device’s unique features, any discussion of the things it does cover wouldn’t be worth much if you didn’t at least know how to access them first. And, as a significant part of Amazon’s innovation is at the heart of navigation itself, it makes sense to start with a brief how-to on finding your way around the device.

Hardware Features

Figure 1-1 identifies the buttons used to access some of the new features we’ll cover throughout this book, along with the cameras that enable those features. For now, here’s a quick run-down on what these buttons and cameras do:

Power button

The power button turns the phone on, of course, but it also brings up the lock screen if the phone is asleep and puts the screen to sleep if you press it quickly when it’s on (or on the lock screen). Pressing and holding it down brings up a menu of options to power off the phone, restart it, or cancel.

Home button

If the phone is asleep, pressing the Home button brings up the lock screen. When the phone is in action, the Home button toggles the screen between Carousel view (discussed in Carousel) and a grid view of all the apps on your device (see the screen in Figure 1-1) or stored in the cloud but not downloaded (toggle between these views by tapping Device or Cloud at the top of the app screen shown in Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. Hardware ...