Kindle Fire Apps and Nook Apps Bring Your New Tablet to Life

Amazon's Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble's Nook Color/Nook Tablet are going to be hot gifts this holiday season. While the Fire is primarily a way to read and watch Amazon's content, and the Nook is a great e-reader, both are actually Android tablets that run thousands of apps. As you settle down on the couch with your bucket of egg nog, follow our lists and instructions to get the best, hottest apps on your new tablet.

Amazon Kindle Fire
The easiest way to download apps onto the Kindle Fire is through the official Amazon AppStore. Here are the 16 Best Kindle Fire Appsto get you started.

If you also have an Android phone, you can run almost any Android app on the Kindle Fire. It takes quite a few steps to move the apps over, but it's actually pretty easy.

You can also turn the Kindle Fire into a standard Android-powered tablet by "rooting" it and installing new ROMs. Geek.com pledges to have instructions on how to do this with the new Kindle Fire 6.2.1 software soon.

Barnes & Noble Nook Color, Nook Tablet
Barnes & Noble's app store on the Nook has fewer apps than the Amazon AppStore, but B&N says the apps are more precisely chosen to work well on the tablets. Get yourself started with the 15 Best Nook Tablet Apps.

A recent software update blocked the ability to hack and load non-B&N-approved apps on the Nook Tablet. The best place to look for updates on how to hack the Nook Tablet is on the discussion boards at xda-developers, where they're searching for a new way to break into the tablet's software and enable other apps to run.

For your smartphone app needs, meanwhile, check out: Download These Apps First For Your Brand-New Smartphone.

About Our Expert

Sascha Segan

Former Lead Analyst, Mobile

My Experience

I'm that 5G guy. I've actually been here for every "G." I reviewed well over a thousand products during 18 years working full-time at PCMag.com, including every generation of the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S. I also wrote a weekly newsletter, Fully Mobilized, where I obsessed about phones and networks.

My Areas of Expertise

US and Canadian mobile networks
Mobile phones released in the US
iPads, Android tablets, and ebook readers
Mobile hotspots
Big data features such as Fastest Mobile Networks and Best Work-From-Home Cities

The Technology I Use

Being cross-platform is critical for someone in my position. In the US, the mobile world is split pretty cleanly between iOS and Android. So I think it's really important to have Apple, Android and Windows devices all in my daily orbit.

I use a Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 for work and a 2021 Apple MacBook Pro for personal use. My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, although I'm probably going to move to an Android foldable. Most of my writing is either in Microsoft OneNote or a free notepad app called Notepad++. Number crunching, which I do often for those big data stories, is via Microsoft Excel, DataGrip for MySQL, and Tableau.

In terms of apps and cloud services, I use both Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive heavily, although I also have iCloud because of the three Macs and three iPads in our house. I subscribe to way too many streaming services.

My primary tablet is a 12.9-inch, 2020-model Apple iPad Pro. When I want to read a book, I've got a 2018-model flat-front Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. My home smart speakers run Google Home, and I watch a TCL Roku TV. And Verizon Fios keeps me connected at home.

My first computer was an Atari 800 and my first cell phone was a Qualcomm Thin Phone. I still have very fond feelings about both of them.

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