If you own a Kindle, update it now

21 Mar 2016

Amazon’s ever-popular Kindle has received a pretty significant software update and, if you haven’t accepted it by 22 March, you may regret it.

For a few weeks now, Kindle users have been receiving software update emails from Amazon, noting a critical change that will render older software pretty useless.

That’s because, starting tomorrow (22 March), anyone who has yet to update their software will be unable to connect to the internet outside of Wi-Fi zones, so no downloading for you.

Most users are grand as the default setting is to automatically update software when connected to Wi-Fi but, for those who have yet to do so, this message will be received from tomorrow:

“Your Kindle is unable to connect at this time. Please make sure you are within wireless range and try again. If the problem persists, please restart your Kindle from the Menu in Settings and try again.”

So, from tomorrow, the only way around this will be to connect to Wi-Fi to manually upgrade the software yourself. Not the biggest chore in the world, but enough to aggravate some less technologically fluent people. People, perhaps, that the Kindle is targeted at.

The devices running the following operating systems are affected:

  •     2nd Generation (2009) (2.5.8)
  •     DX 2nd Generation (2009) (2.5.8)
  •     Keyboard 3rd Generation (2010) (3.4.2)
  •     4th Generation (2011) (4.1.3)
  •     5th Generation (2012)(4.1.3)
  •     Touch 4th Generation (2011) (5.3.7.3)
  •     Paperwhite 5th Generation (2012) (5.6.1.1)

Main Kindle image via dean bertoncelj/Shutterstock

Gordon Hunt was a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com