Amazon has issued a new software update for its Amazon Fire tablet range aimed at improving the late night reading experience.
The company’s current tablet family will shortly be receiving a major software update, and the headline addition is Blue Shade. This technology is specifically designed to make reading late at night on a tablet more viable.
As you’ve no doubt noticed, using a tablet (or smartphone) immediately before bed can delay the process of getting to sleep. That’s because modern smart devices emit a lot of blue light, which can suppress our bodies’s production of melatonin and disrupt our sleeping pattern.
Amazon’s Blue Shade feature filters out the blue light from a Fire tablet’s display to minimal levels. This creates a slightly sickly yellowy-red tint that would be terrible for general tablet activities, but which is just fine for reading ebooks.
You can actually fine tune the colour and brightness of the display under Blue Shade conditions, but the blue wavelength light is always suppressed.
Blue Shade also lowers the general brightness of the screen to reduce eye strain in dark rooms. A handy side effect of this is that battery life is extended by up to 25 percent.
Related: Which Kindle should you buy?
Other additions to the Fire OS 5 ‘Bellini’ software include additional tools for parents who wish to monitor and limit their kids’ internet and app usage. It also includes a kid-specific curated web browser that will only show certain approved sites.
Last year’s Fire HD range will be getting the latest ‘Bellini’ build over the coming months.
Next, take a look at our Amazon Kindle Voyage review video:
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
