Review: A wealth of helpful information - much more than I expected
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 27, 2012
Apps are one of the reasons why I bought the original Kindle Fire, and now with a Kindle Fire HD 7", I still use a lot of apps - mostly games but also a number of utilities and productivity apps. To decide which apps I want to try, I rely largely on Amazon descriptions and reviews, online blogs, and websites such as Gizmodo. "Free Kindle Fire Apps That Don't Suck" is the first book of its type that I've read, and although my expectations weren't too high, I gleaned quite a bit of helpful information from it. The biggest part of the book consists of game apps, with representative arcade games, board games, card games, mind games, logic games, and word games. There's a chapter devoted to Kids apps (for children as young as two years old), including educational apps and animated books. The next section of the book covers productivity apps, utilities, social networking, and other non-game apps.All the apps listed in the book were free at the time the book was published, so in many cases, the app will be a limited version of a paid app, or the app will have ads. Most of the well known mega-hits like Angry Birds and Temple Run are included, but I found a lot of game apps that were highly rated that I had never heard of. At first I was disappointed to not find some of my favorites like Scrabble, but I looked them up, and there are no free versions at this time. (That can change, of course, and that's one downside to books like this - they can't reflect recent changes.)In the introduction, the author lists the criteria that he used to select the top free apps. I was impressed with the thoroughness of his analysis of the selected apps. The criteria included such factors as build quality/stability, graphic design, music/sound effects, ease of use/intuitiveness, features, and - perhaps most important - enjoyment. Some of these factors are fairly subjective and may be very different from your own experience with an app, but overall, it's a pretty detailed look at the selected apps. For some apps, the author even included tips for using the app.I noticed that the author has a number of similar ebooks that list and evaluate apps for the Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD. This book was a free download, and should serve as an introduction to the series. There's enough content in the book for readers to decide if they want to buy the other books.The bottom line: I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of listed apps that I wasn't familiar with, but the descriptions and ratings piqued my interest enough to want to download them and check them out.