On Fire

I got a Kindle Fire about a month after it came out and I've had some time to get used to it. My original Amazon review pointed out that the Fire suffered from a lot of the same issues that many 1.0 products do, and disappointingly, I haven't seen a whole lot of changes. The interface remains more flash than substance and still lacks features that the black and white Kindles take for granted, and there's still a hell of a lot of bugs in there. However, it's still a pretty decent bare-bones tablet, and I've had a chance to start coming up with a list of things I consider essential:

• The Merriam-Webster dictionary app: The Oxford American Dictionary is a fine dictionary, but the Kindle interface to it is nearly unusable outside documents. The MW app is much faster to search and includes basic thesaurus material in each definition; the ad-supported base version is also free.
• Adobe Reader for Android: The PDF rendering on the standard Kindle reader app seems to have serious issues with bitmapped pages, with a strange tendency to drop entire letters in the middle of words and a very poor antialiasing algorithm. Adobe Reader will handle those documents just fine.
• FBReader: You won't need it much (the Fire seems to support epub documents reasonably well) but it helps to have around in case the Kindle app chokes on something it should be able to read.
• Plucker and Calibre: the one-two punch of saving it for later. Although PalmOS is essentially dead but for those keeping old PalmPilots alive for the games, the Kindle Fire can sometimes manage web pages converted with Plucker, and for those it can't, Calibre (despite a truly horrific interface) will make short work of those and nearly any other imaginable file format.
• Farproc Wifi Analyzer: So you know what's available around you. It's not Kismet, but it does enough.
• PG Calculator: I have the free version, which comes with a handful of skins and basic scientific calculator functions. If you care to actually pay for it, you can create custom skins, though the Casio-like one it defaults to is fine. (I'll be playing with others as well, but since I recently got a TI Nspire-CX, my calculator needs are pretty well set for the foreseeable future, barring the sudden appearance of a killer app for the HP-50G.)
• The B&N Nook app: Okay, you may not need this, but sometimes it's nice to be able to access Barnes and Noble's free samples when you're sitting in a store. You don't get the in-store full book access thing with the Android app, though.
• FDroid and GetJar: From what I understand, you can run the Android App Store on the Fire, but you have to root it first. FDroid (free/open source only) and GetJar (free apps) can make up for that.

I have a notepad app, but it doesn't work very well; I haven't found a good PIM app either, but it's not essential to me because I take care of most of that with my iPod. And I can't really make any recommendations on books, since my tastes aren't everyone else's tastes. But this is a good start.