- Setting up an older kindle fire for amazon freetime android#
- Setting up an older kindle fire for amazon freetime plus#
- Setting up an older kindle fire for amazon freetime mac#
That requires more blocking, which is why the use of Kindle FreeTime profiles is a much more elegant solution. It's more complicated when you're dealing with the Kindle Fire, which provides access to content beyond books. Once this is done, parents can purchase the specific books they want for their children from the Amazon web site and send only those to the child's Kindle. You can do this using Parental Controls, under Settings. The easiest is for kids to have their own Kindles tied to a parent's account, but ones in which access to the Kindle Store and Archived Items has been blocked.
That gives them access to any of the books we might have already downloaded to our Kindles, rather than just the ones we specifically want them to read. In turn, to read those books, they need to use one of our Kindles. Our two boys ask to us to buy e-books for them. This new "allow" system - a sharp departure from the "block" method used by current Kindle e-readers, the current Kindle Fire and the iPad - is a welcome change for parents.įor example, my wife and I both have separate Kindle accounts. The shift from blocking content to allowing itĪs explained, parents pick which specific books, videos, games and apps are made available to their children. I have a question in to the Amazon press department about this. No one I spoke to from Amazon at the press event yesterday knew.
What's not clear is whether owners of the original Kindle Fire will have their devices upgraded to include it. Yes, even the new version of the basic Kindle Fire is getting FreeTime, as promised on its product page.
Setting up an older kindle fire for amazon freetime android#
If you want a short glimpse of FreeTime in action, Android Central has a nice video of it being demoed below:įreeTime is coming to all the Kindle Fire devices announced yesterday, from the high-end Kindle Fire HD 8.9-inch 4G LTE version down to the non-HD Kindle Fire. A parent, using a password, has to do that.įreeTime also allows parents to set time limits for how long kids can read books, play apps, watch videos or use the Kindle Fire overall: Time limits in Kindle FreeTime Once it's activated, the child can't exit the mode. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos semi-joked when explaining the color yesterday that it's designed so a parent can easily tell the device is in protective mode when watching their child use it from across the room. The blue color indicates that the Kindle Fire is in FreeTime mode. Below is an example of how your books would appear: FreeTime profile home page After entering your profile's password, it would then be activated. Each child can have their own profile, which in turn has access only to the videos, books, games and apps that parents have selected.įor example, say you were "Jacob" and selected your profile as shown in the screenshot above, of the Kindle FreeTime home screen. But first, how FreeTime works.įreeTime is designed to allow parents easy control over what their children can do on a Kindle Fire. It'll also help more than families, as I'll explain. But it's a good start, and one that I hope we'll see both Apple and Google follow with.
But it sure felt like they could do more to cater to family needs when it came to tablets.Īmazon took a big step forward in improving things for families with Kindle FreeTime. I've found it so annoying that about a year ago, I wrote a post about how the lack of multiple account support was a sign of Apple and Amazon hating families when it came to tablets. But for tablets, it's been the dark ages.
Setting up an older kindle fire for amazon freetime mac#
Mac or Windows, both platforms allow multiple people to use the same machine, logging in with different accounts that are linked to their own settings, data, applications and perhaps even special restrictions. Think how commonplace this is for traditional personal computers. Rather, it was that Amazon became the first major tablet maker to allow different people to have their own accounts on the same device.
Setting up an older kindle fire for amazon freetime plus#
The biggest game changer from Amazon's Kindle Fire announcement yesterday wasn't the pricing, dual WiFi antennas or Dolby Digital Plus sound.