Kindle Fire HD: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Introduction

START SMALL, GET BIG. That motto must be on the wall somewhere at Amazon HQ. You see it in the products they sell (beginning with books and music and moving on to…well, everything), the services they offer (discounted shipping evolving into the Amazon Prime service), and the gadget group that, five years ago, unveiled the clunky but ambitious Kindle e-reader. Soon that had spawned a growing family of fellow Kindles: the jumbo-sized DX followed by many, many variants. It all culminated in the company’s first version of a tablet PC—the Kindle Fire. Now the Fire too has grown into a bigger, better version of itself. The 7-inch model you could cradle in one hand now has strapping 8.9-inch siblings.

The Fire is deceptively powerful. Though it’s got only a few physical buttons, underneath its sleek, simple exterior lies a machine that can do as much as a “real” computer. It’s a Kindle so, of course, you can buy and read ebooks. But because it’s a multi-purpose tablet, that’s just one of its many talents. With it, you also get:

• TV set and movie screen. Bring a Fire into bed or onto the bus, and you’ve got your own personal entertainment center. Amazon’s Hollywood and TV studio dealmakers have put together a cheap and large catalog that’s big enough to rival Netflix and iTunes. Your choices don’t quite match what you’d find on a normal boob tube or cineplex, but you still have thousands and thousands of titles to pick from. This particular revolution is just getting started and ...