Review: A wealth of helpful information
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 13, 2013
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 to try, I rely largely on Amazon descriptions and reviews, online blogs and websites, and word-of-mouth. "Free Kindle Fire Apps That Don't Suck" is only the second 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 (almost 60%) 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 separate chapter devoted to kids apps (for children as young as two years old), including educational apps, animated books, English language, and arithmetic. The next section of the book covers productivity apps, which included drawing and image editing, cooking, calendars, health and fitness, messaging, music/sound, news/weather, reference, social networking, and other non-game apps.All of 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, Temple Run, and Fruit Ninja 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, number of features, and - perhaps most important - overall enjoyment. Some of these factors are highly 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 his own tips for using the app.At the end of the book, the author summarizes his choices with lists of "must have" apps. My only negative comment about the book is that a hot-linked table of contents or index would have been helpful.The bottom line: I was pleasantly surprised to find many 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.