10 Hidden Amazon Fire Stick Features & Settings | Follow and Learn

 

What’s up guys welcome back to another video? Today I'm showing you 10 different hidden features and settings of your fire TV devices. So if you own a fire stick, where you own a fire TV, hopefully some of these will help you out a lot of these things aren't known by the average user because they're not advertised and they're not an instructions and they're not very obvious. So I hope you learn a few things from this, let's get started.

Okay, so the first feature I want to tell you about is the ability to control your fire stick or fire TV with your smartphone, it's very easy all you have to do is go to your App Store and search up Fire TV you download this app here, and it's really simple to use, really quick response times, and it's an official app from Amazon so there's no worries there, a big plus to this feature is there's a keyboard icon in the top right, you can click that and you can start typing using your smartphone, rather than going one letter at a time with a remote control. So go download that app if you haven't already, it's pretty useful.

Alright. The second thing I want to teach you about today is something I covered in a video a while ago, and it's the ability to add a USB port to your fire stick. So by default your fire stick only has one little plug on it, and that's for powering it, you have two options you can get a cable like this, where you can get a little adapter like this. And the second one is more ideal, but it costs a few extra dollars, it fits more nicely with the fire stick and doesn't have any hanging wires around the main use for adding a USB port to your fire stick is going to be for hard drives SD card readers, plugging in wireless keyboards that use a USB adapter, and you can even plug in a USB to Ethernet adapter to not have to use Wi Fi and have a more stable connection to your internet, if you want to access your files from your hard drive that you plug in, you just have to use the ES File Explorer app which you can find right on the App Store also I'll link both of these different adapters in the description below. I've purchased both of them they both work well, and the cable is a little bit cheaper, so go check those out if you're interested.

Okay, so the third feature is a pretty obvious one, but still a ton of people don't use it or they don't know how to use it. What I'm talking about is the ability to use Bluetooth devices, and what you need to do is just go over to settings, go down into the controllers and Bluetooth section, click on that, go to other Bluetooth devices. And here is where you can add your device. So, this is going to be for hooking up wireless headphones wireless keyboards, mice game controllers, stuff like that. So if you wanted to hook up a pair of wireless bluetooth headphones, you could do that through here, and that would allow you to just listen to what you're watching through the headphones only so if you have anybody else in the room that's bothered by what you're watching or anything like that, this will be really helpful for number four, the feature I want to show you is the ability to mirror your Android phone, and what you need to do is hold on your home button for a few seconds, it brings up this menu here, and you can click on mirroring. Once you click on that, it'll turn the wireless mirroring ability on. And then you can go over to your phone or other device and hook up to it wirelessly. So for me, with a Samsung Android phone, I just swipe down from the top here, and I go on to Smart View soon as I click that and turn it on, it presents me with a menu where I can select the fire stick. So once I select the fire stick as an option in that menu, it'll mirror my home screen just like this. This is cool for if you have family over and you want to show them pictures on your phone, or pretty much do anything else on your phone, you could show it on the TV, and you can actually flip your device, over, and it'll show it bigger, in the landscape mode here.

The next thing I want to tell you about is something called HDMI CEC, which the firestick has the capability of using. And so long as your TV is capable of it, you can actually control your TV's inputs and power with your fire device. So let's say you have a cable box and HDMI one, and your fire stick is an HDMI two, and you want to switch over to your fire stick you'll be able to just press a button on your remote, it'll sense that you're waking up your fire stick and switch the input for you without you having to go get your TV remote and do it yourself. So the way that you turn that on, go into device and sound settings. And down here, HDMI CEC device control just turn that on.

For number six, I want to show you the settings for checking how much storage you have left on your fire stick so if you fill up your storage you're going to end up with a bunch of different problems you might not know that it's because your storage is full, but the way that you check is to go to my fire TV, and go into about, and then go to storage, you'll see on the right side it says 3.6 gigs of 5.94 gigs available. So as you can see, I still have plenty of storage left for downloading apps, but it might be worth checking for you.

For number seven, I'm going to show you how to actually close out the apps that you're using right now I'm in YouTube. If I was to just press the home button or the back button and bring me to the screen, the YouTube app is still running in the background, and there's no obvious way on how to close it out like you would on your cell phone, if you have enough apps open in the background you might slow down your firestick. So the way you close out apps that you're no longer using, just go over to settings, go down into the applications menu, and then go to Manage installed apps. And from here, just pick the app that you want to close. So let's do YouTube, we're going to click that and click force, stop. So once you hit four stop, it'll actually completely closed the app and it will no longer be running in the background, therefore your firestick will have more internal resources to spend on things that you're actually doing, rather than just keeping apps open in the background.

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So number eight is another pretty obvious one, but ton of people don't know about it and don't take advantage of it. I'm talking about the ability to have an internet browser on your fire stick. So if you go to the search bar up in the top left, and you type in silk, you'll see this option here silk browser, and this is from Amazon, you can download that and open it and pretty much turn your firestick into a computer, you can go to any website you want, and even have this little circle icon here. And that's going to be pretty much your computer mouse. Yeah, a lot of you guys probably don't know about that one.

For number nine, we're back from the settings menu, and I just want to show you how you can run updates for your firestick. So Amazon releases software updates, over time, so you might be struggling with a problem that might already be fixed and a new update the way you check for it is go into settings, go to the My Fire TV section, click that, click about, and then down here is the section where you can check for updates. So you click that, it'll check. And if you're all up to date on the right hand side, it'll say your fire TV is up to date. It's worth checking that every few weeks or so, maybe every month, and especially if you start to experience problems.

My 10th and final hidden feature I want to share with you is going to be found in the accessibility settings page. If you click into that you can go down here and turn on screen magnifier if you turn that on, you will be able to hold down the fast forward button, and the Back button and it will zoom into the screen for you. So this is going to be good for anytime there's small text on the screen, or things you can't see especially when you use the internet browser on here, things might be pretty small so hold the Back button and fast forward, and you can turn it on and off, just like that. Alright guys that's everything for now, if I can think of some more features I might make a part two to this, if you think of anything, leave it in a comment below for us to read, and I thank you for watching. Please subscribe and like the video if you liked it, I'll see you next time.

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