Amazon has pushed a soft update for its mobile devices

Sep 18, 2014 07:30 GMT  ·  By

Amazon is having a busy week, as the retail giant has rolled out new eReaders and tablets and updated some of its older products.

But the device maker is not only focusing on hardware, but also rolling a software update for it Fire OS. Say hello to Sangria, the fourth iteration of Amazon’s forked version on Android.

The current version is based on Android 4.4 KitKat, so basically the company is updating its tablets and smartphones to the latest standard in terms of OS.

Amazon rolls out Sangria

Those of you purchasing fourth-gen Fire tablets will find the OS has already been pre-installed and is ready to go, but those of you who own 3rd-generation models are also given the chance to update to Sangria via an OTA (over-the-air) update.

Anyway, once you update to the new OS, you’ll notice Amazon’s grip over the home screen, setting panel and such, as well as the app, music, video and book stores, but there are some hints of Android here and there.

Something that Kindle users will certainly find very useful is that Sangria adds support for users profile, so if you are using the tab with members of your family, you can now keep you things separate (apps, games, Twitter, Facebook) without much fuss.

Sangria will tip you on good TV shows

The new software also adds support ASAP (a feature characteristic only of the Amazon Fire TV so far). The feat predicts which TV shows you are most likely to want to watch and gets them up and running before you even think of asking for them. It’s some sort of future mind-reading mechanism.

With the new software update, Amazon seems to be borrowing features from all of its products and combining them into a bundle in an attempt to homogenize its product.

Sangria also adds Firefly support for tablets (which we saw arrive with the advent of the Fire Phone) so you can now identify an item using your slate’s camera and then proceed to search for them online.

Last but not least, Fire OS 4 brings about support for printing in the Silk web browser, improved battery life (via Smart Suspend feature), integration with WPS Office for viewing or editing Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

But there’s more to Sangria than what meets the eye at the moment. At some point, the OS will include a private browsing mode for Silk and a Family Library tool that lets you sync your Amazon account with someone else under your roof, so you can grab one another’s books, videos, apps and so on.