Amazon has released Kindle Fire update 3.1 , which adds many new features, including GoodReads integration, which we knew was coming eventually, and the ability to “fling movies and TV shows from your tablet to your TV.” OS updates don’t usually use that kind of whimsical language, so hooray for Amazon.
Not being a Fire owner, I can’t comment on how well the new or improved features work, but I can say it’s a darned impressive changelog.
- Goodreads integration combines what Amazon emphasizes is the world’s largest e-reading community with the world’s largest community of book lovers.
- Second Screen lets you fling movies and TV shows from your tablet to your TV.
- New enterprise features make Kindle Fire tablets ready for work.
- Cloud Collections helps you organize your books, newspapers, magazines, and apps in customized collections for easy reference, and Amazon’s Whispersync technology synchronizes the collections across your Kindle devices and reading apps so they’re available on all of your devices.
- Voice dictation converts your speech to text—available in all languages when online; offline support available in US English.
- 1-Tap archive which frees up space on your Kindle Fire by identifying items that have not been recently used and provides a 1-tap option to store them in the Cloud for later retrieval.
- Wireless printing of photos, PDF, emails, contacts, calendar, and documents.
- New accessibility enhancements that enable blind and visually impaired customers to save a separate accessibility profile for children in Kindle FreeTime, scroll lists automatically when swipe navigating, hear enhanced sound feedback and screen orientation changes announced, and have more control when editing text and navigating web content.
- Dozens more new features, performance and battery life improvements, and bug fixes.
The Second Screen feature is available for PlayStation 3 and Samsung TVs right now, and will be available “starting later this year” for the PlayStation 4. Hopefully we’ll see other devices next year.
I’d be curious to hear from readers about Cloud Collections and how much it differs from what you already had. Also, is “1-Tap archive” actually useful, or is it as annoying as the “shortcut cleanup” wizard notifications we used to get in Windows XP?
You can wait for your Kindle Fire to update over the air, or you can manually install the update from here.
