Fire New ItemsOne of the features of Amazon’s basic Fire 5.x Bellini OS that marks it out as a content-serving, user-friendly, hand-holding OS is its New Items feature. This pops up key new content – such as, for instance, new books you’ve just bought in the Kindle Store or the latest issues of your magazine subscriptions – as thumbnails on your Home screen, above the menus and app icons. It’ll do this without your intervention when the next issue of a subscription is due, for instance, or when you purchase through the Kindle Store on another device. But is it actually useful?

You can of course make sure your Fire’s content is fresh up to date with the Sync Device command under System in Settings. If there are any New Items that should have popped up onto your Home screen but haven’t yet, that should get them there. I do wonder if a binge buying session on the Kindle Store will cram out the Home screen with New Items, but I haven’t seen that problem – yet.

I would be interested to hear from any Fire users about their issues or achievements with New Items, though. Any problems with it interfering with your Home screen? Any handy tricks you find you could do with the featuure? Input welcome.

1 COMMENT

  1. This sounds like yet another cool feature I won’t be seeing in Canada. My Fire HD 8.9 is still running something like 4.51.somethingorother — just updated the other day. Any idea why they’re harshing on Canada so much these days? No new Fires, no new Fire software, no Echo, no Fire stick?

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