Sideloaded Kindle Fire (Pt II)

It’s been a few days, and the best benefit as yet has been the Libby app. This gets your library card hooked up to the database of books and audio books to lend. There is quite a lot of “feature fight” between the Amazon and Google. The latest being what happens when there is an update of permissions to an app. It seems that although it does suspend an Amazon overwrite, Amazon will not stop bugging you about some updates which are available (but I have yet to analyze exactly how much this consumes in bandwidth, as the firmware update seemed to consume loads of data).

There are some really nice apps which blossom on the 7″ screen, and were just too tiny on a phone. It is good to not be limited to such a small screen now. A list of apps which are almost essentials will follow, as some of the “features” such as adding files (.mp3 for example) to a folder on the Kindle SD, will just not show up. This is likely of the form of marketing from the South Park cable guy school of what no services? Buy here.

So after getting Play Store up and running, what to install?

  1. Chrome – for all your browsing needs.
  2. Outlook – I actually like this from Microsoft, and it does pick up gmail after Chrome is installed. (Not before).
  3. Google Docs and Sheets – these are quite good with Word and Excel files, but do need settings altering for saving in those formats. (Naughty Google).
  4. Facebook, Twitter – although Twitter does need to employ someone with experience of multi-notifications. Maybe it’s a birds everywhere logo-ego design.
  5. Skype – actually not that bad.
  6. USP Spectrum Emulator – don’t tell everyone. It’s excellent if you’re into your retro.
  7. Libby – an excellent public library resource.
  8. Free42 – some consider this to be the pinnacle of calculators before needing to crack open a Mathematica workbook. (An excellent open source reworking not using any HP ROMs). The simple facts that it has such a wide range of open source utilities already written for the backward compatible HP-41 range, and has over 1MB available memory reported, makes it worth getting a Kindle just for this.
  9. VLC – this is quite a nice player of audio and video, and does work with the screen off (with audio). It also reads those hidden by “the cable guy” directories.

If you purchased it using a free Amazon gift voucher, I agree with your choice. Only time will tell the battery service life and the resultant reliance on sticky gum as an assembly procedure for confounding future recycling farce-sillities.