New Fire TV home screen layout brings focus to Games at the expense of User Profiles

Posted by Elias Saba on — 14 Comments

Amazon has been periodically tweaking the navigation menu of the current Fire TV home screen interface ever since it debuted three years ago. First, it reordered the menu, then increased app icon sizes, and then added an input switching icon for Fire TV Smart TVs before finally dropping all text and switching to an icon-only navigation menu. Earlier this year, Amazon added a new “Free” tab to the navigation menu before ultimately removing it. Amazon is now trying out another new tab for the Fire TV home screen with the addition of a “Games” tab that takes the place of the profile switcher icon in the navigation menu. Read more ›

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Exclusive: Fire TVs may soon uninstall your apps for you to free up storage space

Posted by Elias Saba on — 38 Comments

A common issue many Fire TV users run into is running out of internal storage space for their apps and games. Even though it has been nine years since the first Fire TV debuted with 8GB of internal storage, nearly all Fire TV models, including all Fire TV Sticks, still only come with that same 8GB of storage. Worse yet, as Fire OS has increased in size over the years and the number of pre-installed system apps have ballooned in both size and quantity as well, there is now less than 4GB of free space on most Fire TV models out of the box. One solution to the problem that Amazon is working on is simply automatically removing apps you don’t use much, but, thankfully, it seems like it won’t be as ridiculous of a solution as it may initially sound. Read more ›

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Two unreleased 2023 Fire TV models pass through FCC approval

Posted by Elias Saba on — 25 Comments

What appears to be a pair of new Fire TV devices have just received FCC approval, as first spotted by Janko Roettgers. Both of the two new models were submitted to the FCC by Amazon as a “Digital Media Receiver” and, while there is no explicit mention of either one being a Fire TV device, the fillings have familiar characteristics that allude to these being Fire TV Sticks. Furthermore, the two devices are variants of each other, which likely means these are either a standard model and a “Lite” model, or a standard model and a “Max” model. Read more ›

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New-ish Fire TV Channels app consolidates all of Fire TV’s free streaming content in one place

Posted by Elias Saba on — 23 Comments

You may have noticed it appearing throughout the month, but Amazon has now officially released its new-ish Fire TV Channels app on Fire TV devices. Over the past few years, Amazon has been adding free ad-supported content throughout the Fire TV home interface in the form of short clips and full-length videos across numerous categories like news, sports, entertainment, gaming, cooking, travel, and more. Earlier this year, Amazon branded all this built-in free content as “Fire TV Channels” with the promise that it would soon add “a single, easy-to-navigate” method to access this content. That method has now arrived in the form of the new Fire TV Channels app, which isn’t actually as new as it may seem. Read more ›

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Head of all Amazon devices to retire in the coming months after 13 years with the company

Posted by Elias Saba on — 12 Comments

Amazon has revealed that Dave Limp, the Senior Vice President of Amazon Devices and Services, will be retiring later this year after over 13 years with the company. Limp is the head honcho when it comes to Amazon devices, including Fire TVs, Echos, Fire Tablets, Kindles, and much more. All the different Amazon services, like Alexa, the Amazon Appstore, and Luna fall under his control as well. It sounds like Limp will stick around to host his annual new devices event in September. His successor will be announced in the coming weeks.

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How to Factory Reset an Element or Westinghouse Fire TV Edition Smart TV without a remote or access to the OS

Posted by Elias Saba on — 2 Comments

It has been just over 6 years since Element and Westinghouse released the first ever smart TVs running Amazon’s Fire TV operating system built in. While they’re certainly not up to par with modern Fire TV Smart TVs in many ways, they are still perfectly functional TVs and I still use mine every day. When needed, it’s usually straightforward to factory reset any Fire TV Smart TV through the “Device & Software” menu on the Settings screen, but if your TV has encountered an issue that is so bad that you can no longer use the remote or access the operating system, there is a way to factory reset these early Fire TV Smart TVs using nothing but the physical buttons on the TV itself. Read more ›

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TCL releases new budget-friendly S4 Class 4K Fire TV Smart TVs

Posted by Elias Saba on — 1 Comment

Just over a month after TCL debuted its first Fire TV Smart TVs in the US with the release of the premium TCL Q6 Class 4K QLED Fire TVs, the TV manufacturer is now releasing new budget-friendly 4K Fire TV sets. TCL’s S4 Class TVs, which were previously only available as Roku and Google TV models, are now available with the Fire TV operating system in a slew of sizes ranging from 43-inches to 75-inches. Read more ›

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Amazon Omni QLED Series Fire TVs can now display a new Dynamic Art collection

Posted by Elias Saba on

Amazon has announced that its flagship Omni QLED Fire TV Smart TVs are gaining a new dynamic art collection that can be set as the TV’s background while displaying the Fire TV Ambient Experience. In collaboration with artist Samuel Stubblefield and his technical lead Ethan Rainbolt, the dynamic art is personalized by using algorithms to change based on the ambient light in the room, your location’s weather, and the time of day. This new dynamic art option can be found in the Fire TV’s ambient gallery options, which can be accessed by saying “Alexa, go to Ambient gallery,” starting today in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, and Mexico. As the Amazon Omni QLED Fire TVs are the only ones with the Fire TV Ambient Experience at the moment, they are the only Fire TV devices that support this new feature.

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Explanation of this seemingly useless WiFi option on Fire TVs

Posted by Elias Saba on — 11 Comments

While browsing recent Fire TV related articles and videos, I came across this YouTube video published yesterday by someone who is understandably confused by the purpose of a relatively new Fire TV option that allows users to turn WiFi off. Anyone who has ever used a Fire TV knows that it is practically useless without a network connection, so either a WiFi or Ethernet connection is always necessary. When connected to Ethernet, the device, essentially, ignores WiFi networks, so why would someone ever need to manually disable WiFi? Read more ›

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Fire TV owners should know about these two gaping holes in Parental Controls

Posted by Elias Saba on — 1 Comment

Amazon Fire TVs have a decently robust set of parental controls to help lock the streaming device down from curious kids. Thousands, if not millions, of parents have likely set up a Fire TV for their kids with an assortment of safe apps and appropriate settings and then confidently enabled parental controls with reassurance that nothing their little one does will break out of the walled garden they’ve just created. Unfortunately, there are two pretty big holes in the Fire TV’s parental controls that can not only give someone without the seemingly necessary PIN code access to all sorts of unfavorable content but also the ability to render the entire device unusable. Read more ›

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