Kindle

We’ll bet you didn’t know that you don’t need one of Amazon’s Kindle e-readers to enjoy a lot of the device’s other features. You can just as easily download Amazon’s Kindle app for iPhone or Android and get access to the company’s online e-book store. Then you just need a device you can read on, and an iPhone or Android phone works just fine.

Kindle syncs with your Amazon account, so anything you’ve already purchased shows up in the app, and you can make more purchases by following a link to Amazon’s e-book store, which contains more than 860,000 titles. The Kindle app organizes all of your e-books and stores them online in the Amazon cloud, so they can be accessed from all of your devices — including Kindle e-readers, iPhones and Android phones, tablets and Blackberry devices. They all carry the same great interface between devices.

Reading a book on a cell phone isn’t really ideal no matter what, but Kindle offers what’s probably the best version of the experience. Pages feature big, clean type without a lot of distractions. Kindle fans who don’t always want to carry around their device should definitely grab this app.

Reviewed: May 23, 2011 | Phil Hornshaw

Also featured on: Best Android Tablet Apps of 2012, Also featured on: Introduction to Windows 8 Apps: What You Need to Know