Fire and Touch User’s Guides available!

Fire and Touch User’s Guides available!

A thousand thanks to tuxgirl, one of my regular readers and commenters for the heads-up on this!

I’ve been checking the Kindle documentation help page and the product page for the Kindle Fire and the Kindle Touch. I was hoping to find the User’s Guide. That’s the best source of information on a Kindle. If somebody says, “RTFM” (Read the Effing Manual), that’s the manual they mean. 🙂

Well, here they are!

http://kindle.s3.amazonaws.com/Kindle_Fire_Users_Guide.pdf

That was on the new

Kindle Fire help page

For the Touch:

http://kindle.s3.amazonaws.com/Kindle_Touch_Users_Guide.pdf

Kindle Touch help page

Well, I’m going to have some reading to do tonight!

Before I head off, I see some questions I can answer right away about the Fire:

• You have Collections
• You have the same text size options as the Kindle 3 (8 text sizes, typefaces)
• You can create notes and they do sync

>Hey, wait a minute! A lot of these links seem to be generic Kindle pages…they may not apply to the Kindle Fire specifically! Oddly, some of them reference Amazon.co.uk, instead of Amazon.com. I’d better get reading the User’s Guide before we consider any of that definitive…and we’ll know even better when I get test the device. Some of the information on the help page is clearly about the Fire, and maybe all of it is…but it isn’t clear.

Thanks again, tuxgirl!

Update: okay, I’ll jot down some things from the Fire User’s Guide:

• You can read magazines either in Page View or in Text View. That’s nice: you have the option to have them look like the print edition, or just be the words
• We still have the Aa button to adjust “…font style, typeface, line spacing, margins, and color mode”
• Yes, you can add notes and do highlighting
• Yes, it does do Whispersync to keep your books in sync with other devices
• They show the “Kindle Panel” view for comics…it’s cool!
• You can create playlists for music
• The USB cable is sold separately: “…via a micro-USB cable (sold separately)”
• “…Kindle Fire e-mail supports Google Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and AOL along with most industry-standard IMAP and POP e-mail systems”
• “With the provided Quickoffice® document viewer, you can easily view Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations”
• It does not support Microsoft Exchange Server (Outlook), but they suggest you can get an app in the Amazon Appstore to do that
• You can unlock and lock screen rotation, suggesting that there is an inclinometer…there was some doubt about that
• You can adjust the brightness easily…might help in brighter light, although it won’t be like a reflective screen Kindle
• You can choose the sleep interval
• You can set a password
• You can manually set the date and time
• You can set sound on the keyboard (it helps a lot of people to hear clicks), auto capitalization, and “quick fixes” (presumably, that’s an auto expander or autocorrect)
• It is a standard 3.5mm audio jack

It’s actually a slim (to use a physical universe adjective) 23 pages…not much for a device that does so much. That suggests it will be pretty easy and intuitive to use.

No mention of text-to-speech, by the way. No mention of being able to print from Silk (I’ve been asked about that). I’ll know more when I get the device…but you know more now than you did before. 😉

My order is still saying “shipping soon” and November 16th…

Update: this was on the trouble-shooting page for the Fire:

“Kindle Fire doesn’t support Whispersync of notes, highlights, bookmarks and your last page read across devices.”

That seems weird, because it works on the Kindle for Android app.

People have asked about pre-installed apps. The troubleshooting page lists these:

Audible, Gallery, Shop App, IMDb, and Pulse.

Audible (audiobooks) and IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) are both owned by Amazon. The Gallery makes sense (by the way, your personal videos you’ve sideloaded will be there, not in your video library). The Amazon shopping app seems obvious.  I’m assuming that Pulse is the app that organizes your RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds.

Update: I just got a text that my Fire has been “fulfilled and your package is on its way”! Woo-hoo!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.