Make Me A God Of Fire!

February 11, 2013 6:20 PM

Can you help me make more of my Kindle Fire?

Help me make the most of the Kindle Fire HD. I want to make better use of my Kindle Fire HD 7 inch.

I am an Amazon Prime member. I hardly use my Kindle at all. Have had it nearly 3 months. I want to use it more.

I am primarily an Apple eco-system sort of guy at home, support Windows 7 and an assortment of other OSes and devices professionally, so you can consider me fairly technically proficient, but this is my first Android device.

I want it for development of web content and eventual Kindle pub development, but would love to make as much use out of it as possible.

I am not adverse to spending money to make it do impressive things.

posted by cjorgensen to computers & internet (4 answers total)

First of all, do you have the basics covered? Get a good mail client for it, like K-9 Mail; the built-in Amazon mail client is terrible. I use "IMO" (or "imo.im", they keep rebranding it) for instant messaging, and it's fairly nice. Between the two of those you get most of the way towards recovering the functionality of a stock Android device with Gmail and Google Talk, neither of which you get get on the Fire via straightforward means. Also, Skype on the Fire HD is pretty good, if you know anyone who uses Skype.

In terms of content, ComiCat is a great app for reading comic books / graphic novels and totally worth the $3 if you have any interest in CBZ/CBR comics.

Plex is pretty nice if you mostly use your Kindle in your own house; it lets you stream content from a central media server to all your devices. (I have it on my Roku boxes rather than my Kindle as I rarely use the latter at home, but if you do it could be nice.)

And if you are willing to spend some money, you might want to think about putting your music collection into Amazon MP3 cloud storage facility, which will make it accessible on the Kindle whenever you want it, but won't consume local storage except when you explicitly download it. That's fairly nice. It doesn't play especially well with iTunes, though; if you have a lot of iTMS-sourced or AAC-encoded music, I think it will get skipped over by Amazon during the upload process.

Those are the things I have learned since getting mine a few months ago; I'm interested to see what other tips folks have.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:35 PM on February 11

Honestly, I returned the Kindle Fire I got as a present for an Asus Transformer. I returned it in box, but the store demos did not leave me impressed with how much of android they left out.

FWIW, these are the main not-games apps I've got installed on my transformer: ConnectBot and Hacker's Keyboard are both very nice and complimentary if you're a screen+irssi person. Evernote is widely regarded, though I haven't quite figured out how it shall fit into my professional life. I use AntennaPod to download podcasts on my phone, but it works equally well on tablets. I have Firefox installed, which does a good job syncing bookmarks and such between devices, but is depressingly slow at rendering.
posted by pwnguin at 8:35 PM on February 11

I got a free ebook about the Kindle Fire HD that recommended a visit to GetJar for sideloading Android apps Amazon doesn't carry. This yielded a recipe app and some games I didn't have previously. I like the Dolphin browser better than Silk.

If you want to read epubs on the Fire, try FBReader for Android. I picked it up after reading Gutenberg.org's review of the Fire HD.

Also, you can add your own videos to the device. Get a video converter like Handbrake if your videos are in a format the Fire HD doesn't like.

I haven't bothered with the stock email app yet. When I need to shove a link around, I click the Share Link button on whatever app and then select Share with Evernote. It's not as much of a hassle as it may seem if you're already an Evernote user.
posted by dragonplayer at 11:58 AM on February 12

Go wild with the free apps - there are many, and they are great.

I read the news for about an hour and a half each morning (I wake up early), and by far the best aggregator of all the things I read is Feedly. It's free, very Google Chrome-friendly, and you can start a reading session on your Kindle and finish in Chrome, which makes things handy. It's an RSS feed that combines all of your trusted news sources into bundles, and then pushes to the top the most linked-to from within each bundle (and overall). It's pretty sweet. And though I am highly biased toward Feedly, I was also satisfied with Pulse and Flipboard.

If you find articles you want to read on Feedly but don't have the time, you can always save them to Pocket, which allows you to read the articles offline (and is very well designed).

Astrid has dramatically improved my time management. This is an app worth learning - I've designed a system of filters that now automatically sorts my tasks by importance and urgency, and it has helped me to get things done tremendously.

Evernote, as many before me have noted, is amazing, and one you should check out as much for its potential as for what it actually does. It is one of the most cross-platform apps I have ever used - you can attach photos, sketches, audio recordings, writings, all together as part of a cohesive whole for building your ideas. It's handy, and it naturally accommodates you, however you think.

Pandora & 8Tracks, both staples, are excellent for discovering new music.

The only disappointing thing about the Kindle, unfortunately, is its reading capabilities. I don't want to criticize the e-reader itself - it's great - but the availability of ebooks to you will always be something incredibly limited. The Kindle Owners' Lending Library is incredibly disappointing in its selection, and Overdrive still has a long way to go before most books will be available on it. I did not find Amazon Prime to be much better - it seems like anytime you want to enjoy an ebook, you have to pay for it - a truth that, more times than not, sends me back to my local library. Still, I love my kindle - the apps are awesome, and you can find some crazy ones out there (police scanners, etc.).

Check out Kindle user blogs too - or reviews of Kindle apps - these are how I discovered many of the above^
posted by sidi hamet at 7:34 PM on February 12