Amazon’s Fire tablets now have a blue light filter to help you sleep after nighttime reading

Amazon is bringing some updates to its tablets today that could make late-night reading a lot more pleasant, as well as adding tools for parents to keep tabs on their kids.

First up is a new feature called Blue Shade, which filters out blue light in order to help you sleep better; much like popular app f.lux. Science tells us that blue wavelengths emitted by our screens and lights make it harder to fall asleep (sunlight contains a lot of blue). By filtering out those wavelengths, your brain can keep a more regular sleep pattern.

You can access the feature by tapping the new Blue Shade option in the quick settings menu. Aside from filtering out blue light, it also lets you add warm color filters and the ability to lower your display brightness even more than usual for nighttime reading in a dark room.

Meanwhile parents have a new tool called Activity Center which lets them check up on how much time their kids spend playing games, watching movies and reading on the tablets. They can also check on the kids’ browser history.

Speaking of browsing, Amazon’s also implementing a kid-friendly Web browser with a curated set of “more than 40,000” YouTube videos and websites. Amazon says the pages were selected by teaming up with Common Sense media to review their age-appropriateness, and parents can whitelist their own set of sites as well.

The updates begin rolling out today over the air to the Fire HD 10, Fire HD 8 and other Fire tablets.

➤ Amazon