Be in control of your digital life

Most of us have a Facebook account and an email address and a lot of people have Twitter accounts too, not to mention the plethora of other social media platforms that demand our attention. When all of these accounts are gathered up and put into a smartphone or a tablet you suddenly have a portable digital cloud and full notification centre and for some it's fine but if you are like me I do not want a constant stream of beeps. I have an iPad for getting things done and a 7" Android tablet that I have had for ages plus an Amazon Fire HD6 - a recent acquisition. 

It was the purchase of the Fire that brought this feature to mind. I took it out of its box, turned it on and began the familiar set up process, (most tablets and computers are the same here) choosing your preferred language and country, select and connect to a wireless network then sign in or create your account. I did this on the Fire and simply watched as a few seconds ticked by and all my books simply appeared and after a few minutes I was notified of a system update. Once all this was done and I had installed a few apps - not games, I'm just not into them much I then proceeded to read the book I had been reading on my Android tablet. As I expected the book opened up exactly where I had left off before, all the familiar controls were there too so it wasn't long before I was immersed in a different world happily reading, page after page. A few days later it just dawned on me that although the Fire HD6 has an email app I had not bothered to set it up and I had not signed into Facebook either - my mobile phone does Facebook as does my laptop but that's it, my tablets don't do Facebook. As a result of this I had uninterrupted reading, no bleeps ding-dongs or anything, just reading - fantastic. So I appreciate there may be those out there who want whatever device they have to be adorned with all their social media but for the rest of us, yes you can have peace in the garden or just sat indoors in complete silence. 

An Android tablet will require you to sign in with your Google account or create one and sign in and once this is done your Google email is instantly set up on that device, a Windows tablet will do the same as you are signing in using your Microsoft account and an iPad will at least ask you to set up with an Apple account and generally you will get an iCloud email address given to you. The bottom line here is that Amazon do not provide email addresses so there is not really a need to set it up and it's definitely not required for purchases on a Kindle or Fire HD.

You can of course on an existing Android tablet go into the settings of your email app and turn off notifications thus giving you a similar experience.