Online retail Giant Amazon announced the release of Fire OS 3.1 on Monday, a software update for the Kindle Fire HD and HDX tablets.
Fire OS 3.1 brings some new bits and bobs to Amazon’s latest tablet lineup, the Kindle Fire HD and the 7in and 8.9in kindle fire HDX tablets.
Key Features: 7-inch IPS screen, 1,920 x 1,200 pixel resolution;
Quad-core 2.2GHz Snapdragon 800 with 2GB RAM;
Custom Amazon UI Fire 3.1, Android Jelly Bean; 4,550mAh battery; 720p front-facing camera
Manufacturer: Amazon
As part of the latest Kindle Fire platform update, Amazon has rolled out features that will make the tablets fit better into a work environment. These features alone will not elevate the Kindle Fire HDX to a serious business tool, but they do mean you can now use the device for more than just catching up on your reading and playing Angry Birds at home.
The big news is that the Kindle Fire HDX now has a native VPN client app. While you could download a VPN client, the integration makes things simpler. And that’s what Kindle Fire is all about. Like everything Amazon does with its Kindle HDX series, setting up a VPN is simple. For each profile, you’ll enter a name for the profile, choose from a selection of VPN security protocols, and select whether you want PPP encryption.
Regular customers of Amazon will appreciate that integration. A row of tabs at the top of the screen offers quick access to various Amazon services, including e-books, music, videos and audiobooks, the latter from the Audible business that Amazon bought in 2008. Another tab gets you Amazon’s shopping site, where you can buy television sets, vacuum cleaners and tennis rackets. The Kindle is already tied to your Amazon account, so it’s easy – perhaps too easy – to just click and buy.
The Fires are built really nicely. A mix of glass, soft-touch plastic and glossy piano-black plastic combine with well-engineered fine lines to make the tablets comfortable to hold and use. Extremely light — 303g for the 7-inch and 374g for the 8.9-inch — and well balanced, both devices are easy to hold while watching a long movie or reading a few hundred pages of a novel. Being very thin and very light makes quite a bit of difference, and both models are suitable for one-hand holding.
Features:
Amazon’s re-skinned version of Android is still at the heart of the Kindle Fire HDX, so there’s no customizable home screens or widgets to be found here. Running on the Custom Amazon UI Fire 3.0 over Android Jelly Bean, it’s once again all about driving you through Amazon’s various content portals whether it’s the Amazon app store, Kindle eBooks or making use of Amazon’s various cloud supported services.
The heavy re-skinning of Android is not going to be to everyone’s tastes, but it runs much smoother than it does on the Amazon Kindle Fire HD even if it takes some time to get to grips with some features like swiping away from the bezel to get back to the home screen.
Crucially, Amazon has improved the Kindle Fire HD X’s innards adding a quad-core 2.2GHz Snapdragon 800 with 2GB of RAM. In theory, it should make it faster than the Nexus 7 2 and it’s clear things definitely run quicker.
Elsewhere, the Kindle Fire HDX includes a 720p HD front-facing camera, is available in 16/32/64GB models and has a promised battery life of up to 11 hours thanks to the 4,500mAh nestled inside its slimmer body.
Amazon Kindle VP Peter Larsen said, “The response to our new family of Kindle Fire tablets has been fantastic, and we’re excited to add new features we think our customers will love.”
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