Of course, there are a few modest strings attached to Amazon’s free trials. For starters, you’ll need an Amazon account, and you’ll have to enter a credit card number. It’s also up to you to cancel any free trials you sign up for before they expire, unless you decide to become a paying member.

Last but not least, you’ll need to be an Amazon Prime member to sign up for Amazon’s free trials. But guess what: you can always just sign up for a free 30-day Amazon Prime trial, and yes, that’ll count.

HBO

You can catch up on “Westworld” once you sign up for a free 30-day HBO trial through Amazon.

Length of free trial: 7 days

The home of such binge-worthy shows as “Game of Thrones,” “Westworld,” “Veep,” “Silicon Valley,” and “True Detective” can be yours for 7 days of free streaming—and don’t forget, that includes access to older HBO shows like “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and “Deadwood.”

Sign up for a free 7-day HBO trial

Amazon Prime Video

Length of free trial: 30 days

Some of the best shows around are coming from Amazon Prime, including “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (seen it, loved it), along with “The Man in the High Castle,” “Transparent,” “Fleabag,” and “Good Girls Revolt.” The 30-day free trial also gives you the run of Prime’s massive streaming movie collection.

Sign up for Amazon’s 30-day Prime trial

Showtime

Among the shows you can binge-watch during your Showtime 7-day free trial: “Showtime,” “The Affair,” and “Weeds.”

Length of free trial: 7 days

“Homeland,” “The Affair,” “Weeds,” “Shameless,” “Billions,” “Ray Donovan,” and other popular Showtime shows are up for grabs via Amazon’s free trial—just 7 days rather than a month, but hey, it’s a free week, right? As with HBO, you’ll need to be a Prime member—either paying or on a trial basis—to sign up for a free Showtime trial.

Sign up for a free 7-day Showtime trial

Starz

Length of free trial: 7 days

It may not be as well known as HBO or Showtime, but Starz is an up-and-comer when it comes to only-on-cable TV shows. Among them: “Outlander,” “American Gods,” “Black Sails,” “Flesh and Bone,” “The Girlfriend Experience,” and “Spartacus.”

Sign up for a free 7-day Starz trial

Audible

Length of free trial: 30 days

Whether you’re stuck in traffic or cruising at 35,000 feet, there’s nothing like a gripping audiobook to make the time fly. Before you head out for another commute or board your next long-haul flight, load up your iPhone or Android device with a couple of free audiobooks courtesy of Audible, which is offering two downloads if you sign up for a 30-day trial.

Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial

Kindle Unlimited

Length of free trial: 30 days

Think of Kindle Unlimited as Netflix for bookworms. Choose from more than a million Kindle books, download as many as you want, and read them on any Kindle-friendly device, from a dedicated Kindle reader to an iPhone or Android phone. Even better, many Kindle Unlimited titles come with free Audible audiobook versions, too.

Sign up for a free 30-day Kindle Unlimited trial

Amazon Music Unlimited

A 30-day trial for Amazon Music Unlimited gives you all-you-can-stream access to millions of tunes.

Length of free trial: 30 days

Amazon’s streaming music service offers millions of songs and thousands of streaming radio stations—and yes, you can crank as many Music Unlimited tunes as you want, all day and every day. Regular Prime Music memberships go for $10 a month ($8 for Prime members), but you can listen for free once you sign up for a 30-day trial.

Sign up for a free 30-day Amazon Music Unlimited trial

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Normally priced at $50, Amazon’s 7-inch Fire tablet is a steal at 40 bucks. Boasting front- and rear-facing cameras as well as 8 GB of storage (which you can easily expand thanks to the microSD memory card slot), the Fire tablet makes for a great way to read Kindle books, stream Prime Video movies and TV shows, and even chat with Alexa, Amazon’s digital assistant (like Siri on an iPhone). You’ll also be able to browse the web, check your email, and get access to thousands of apps on Amazon’s app store, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Netflix.

Check out the $40 Fire tablet on Amazon!

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The $29 Roku Express sits right next to your HDTV and comes with just two ports: one for an HDMI cable that plugs into your TV set, another for power. Once you’ve hooked it up, just connect the Roku Express to your Wi-Fi network, switch your TV to the right video input (like, say, HDMI 1 or HDMI 2), and start streaming shows from the likes of Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Google Play, and more. Also nice: the easy-to-use remote, which boasts big, bright buttons that send you directly to Netflix, Hulu and other streaming services.

Check out the Roku Express on Amazon!

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If you’re not quite ready to take the leap, Amazon is offering a 30-day free trial that gives you the run of all Prime services—and yes, free two-day shipping on Amazon purchases is included, perfect for saving a bundle on shipping costs during the holidays.

Sign up for free 30-day Amazon Prime trial

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Read on for 8 things you need to know about Amazon’s new Fire phone, starting with…

1. It’s got a 4.7-inch display…

…that adds the illusion of depth to the Fire’s on-screen menus, lock screens, user interface, and so on.

No, you won’t need 3D glasses to see this so-called “dynamic perspective” effect. Instead, the Fire phone tracks your head’s movement with a quartet of tiny, front-facing cameras and adjusts the image accordingly.

Sounds neat (and no, I haven’t actually seen the 3D-ish screen in action yet), but doesn’t this also mean that the Fire phone is … well, always watching you through those four itty-bitty cameras? Hmmm.

2. It can recognize more than “100 million” products (says Amazon) at the press of a button

The feature is called “Firefly,” and it (again) uses the Fire phone’s camera to zero in on books, DVDs, artwork, bar codes, and so on.

Once it recognizes an item, it pulls up all the details you can stand—plus, of course, a “buy it now!” button for anything that Amazon happens to sell.

Firefly can also dial phone numbers or input email addresses it sees printed on, say, billboards or newspapers, and it can even identify songs on the radio or TV shows playing on your HDTV.

Last but not least, you won’t need to pull up an app to start ID’ing products with Firefly; instead, you just press the dedicated Firefly button on the side of the phone.

3. Unlimited “cloud” photo storage

Unlike Apple and Google, Amazon is promising unlimited online storage for all your Fire snapshots.

So yes, feel free to snap away, then go ahead and check out your pictures—all of them—in your Amazon Cloud Drive.

4. It’ll scroll automatically as you’re reading

Reading a Kindle book (what else?) on your Fire phone? Just tilt the screen to scroll through the text automatically. You can also lock the scrolling speed once you’re reading at a steady pace.

In case you’re curious, the same four front-facing cameras that do the “dynamic perspective” trick also help out with the Fire’s tilt-to-scroll feature.

5. It’ll stream all your purchased Amazon music and videos, as well as download your Kindle books…

…just as Amazon’s Fire tablets do. No surprise there.

6. You’ll only be able to get the Fire phone on AT&T…

…good news for those with great AT&T reception, bad news for anyone (like me) who doesn’t.

7. It’ll cost $199 with a two-year contract…

…for the 16GB version, or $299 with contract for the 32GB model. Also worth noting: Amazon will toss in a year-long Prime membership (worth $99) as part of a “limited introductory” offer. Not bad.

8. It’ll ship on July 25…

…and you can pre-order it now—on Amazon, of course.

Got questions about the Fire Phone? Post ’em in the comments below!

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Sure, there is a way to buy Kindle books on an iPhone or iPad by navigating to the Kindle store from the Safari web browser, but it’s a clunky solution.

But while you still can’t (and likely won’t ever be able to) buy Kindle books directly from the Kindle iOS app, the app will, in fact, let you download free samples—no Safari required.

The trick? Here goes…

• Just launch the Kindle app, go to the main Library screen, tap the Menu button in the top-left corner, then tap Search.
• Next, type the name of any book or author.
• Any matching books in your personal Kindle collection will appear at the top of your search results. Below that, though, will be a second list labeled “Kindle Free Samples.”
• Tap a title in the list, and the free sample should start downloading instantly. Once the download is completed, you’ll find it in your Kindle library, or you can just tap the title directly from your search results.
• Want to buy the complete book? Well, you can add it to your Amazon “wish list” by tapping a button, but you’ll still need to jump back to Safari to hit the “Buy Now” button.

Click here for more iOS tips, or click here for Kindle help!

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But if you try to re-read a Kindle book that you finished a year ago, your various Kindle devices will want to jump to the very last page you read—meaning, most likely, the end of the book—even if you only re-read to Chapter 2 the other day.

Ugh.

The good news, though, is that you can reset the “furthest page read” for any Kindle book you wish.

Once that’s done, the Kindle’s Whispersync feature (which also keeps track of your bookmarks, highlights, and notes) will essentially forget the last page you read in a given book and start over—and yes, that means you’ll again be able to jump back and forth between your various Kindle devices without losing your place.

You can reset the “furthest page read” for a given Kindle book from the “Manage Your Kindle” settings in your Amazon account.

Here’s how…

• Log onto your Amazon account from a desktop browser, hover your mouse over the “Your Account” tab, then select “Manage Your Kindle” from the drop-down menu.
• Browse your Kindle library until you find the book you’re re-reading, or just type the title into the search box.
• Once you’ve found the right book, click the “Actions” button on the right side of the page and click the “Clear furthest page read” option.
• Now, the next time you open that particular book, the first page it opens to will become the “furthest” page read as far as your Kindle devices and apps are concerned.

Looking for more Kindle tips? Click here!

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We’re talking the complete “Twilight Saga” box set, for starters. Also: a pile of “Team Jacob” buttons. A Bella-themed Barbie doll. A 16-month (?) Twilight calendar. And best of all, a bookmark stamped with the smouldering eyes of Edward himself.

What happened? Amazon scanned my shopping history and cranked out some recommendations—in this case, all based on a few ill-advised minutes of “Twilight” shopping.

Just to be clear, I don’t have anything against “Twilight.” (Hey, I thought the first “Twilight” movie was pretty good; the others, not so much.)

That said, I’d rather not have my Amazon home page plastered with “I Heart Edward Cullen” buttons whenever my cursor gets too close to a “Twilight” book.

Related: How to keep Google from saving your searches in your Web history

Well, good news: Not only can you view your browsing history as Amazon sees it, you can also nix any individual items you may have looked at—or stop Amazon from tracking your browsing habits altogether, at least as far as recommending new products is concerned.

Here’s what you do:

• Visit Amazon.com, then click the Your Account link in the top-right corner of the page. (In case you’re wondering, no—you don’t need to be logged in to your Amazon account to follow the Your Account link. More on that in a moment.)


Want to keep Amazon from recommending products based on your shopping habits? Just click the "Turn off browsing history" link.

• Scroll down to the Personalization section (it’s all the way at the bottom), then click the “View and edit your browsing history” link under the “Personalized Content” heading.
• You’ll now see a long list of recent items you’ve viewed on Amazon, complete with “Delete this item” links next to each entry. Don’t want Amazon to remember those Edward Cullen bookmarks you looked at? Just click the “Delete this item” link. You can also wipe your browsing slate clear by clicking the “Delete all items” button in the left column.
• Want to turn off your Amazon browsing history? Go to the “Your Account” page, click the “Your Browser History Settings” under “Personalized Content,” then click the “Turn browsing history off” button.

Oh, and one thing to keep in mind: Your Amazon browsing history is tied to your web browser, not your Amazon.com account. That means if your turn your Amazon browsing history off in Safari, switch to another web browser and then return to Amazon, you’ll have to turn off your Amazon browsing history all over again.

Bonus tip

 
Just because you turn off your Amazon browsing history doesn’t mean Amazon isn’t watching your surfing habits anymore. Like other companies that deal in online advertisements, Amazon deposits a “cookie” on your browser that tracks your surfing for the purpose of serving up personalized ads.

Don’t want to be tracked anymore? Click “Your Account” in the top-right corner of any Amazon.com page, click the “Your Advertising Preferences” link under “Personalized Content,” then click the “Do Not Personalize Ads from Amazon for this Internet Browser” setting.

Have more questions about online shopping, browsing, or privacy? Post ’em in the comments below.

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Update: Check out my own hands-on with the Kindle Fire right here.

Amazon is set to start shipping the Fire—a full-color tablet with a seven-inch screen and access to thousands of streaming movies, millions of Kindle books, hundreds of magazines, a mountain of music, and apps like Netflix, Hulu, Facebook, and Angry Birds—this week. (And let’s not forget that Barnes & Noble is teeing up its own Fire competitor, the $250 Nook Tablet.)

But a few pre-release reviews are already trickling in, and the consensus seems to be that the Fire is still a little rough around the edges: a bit too thick and solid, “sluggish jerky” when it comes to graphics, limited in the memory department (just 8GB, versus a minimum of 16GB for the iPad), and lacking key features like speedy 3G support (meaning you’ll need a Wi-Fi connection to go online), GPS, and a camera or microphone (so no video chat).

That said, reviewers say, the Fire has an ace up its sleeve: its $200 price tag, making for one of the best tablet bargains now on the market, warts and all.

The Fire is also winning praise for its ability to tap into your digital “locker” on Amazon.com, which turns the modest tablet into a Wi-Fi-connected treasure chest of seemingly limitless entertainment—although to take full advantage of the Fire’s online services, you’ll need to shell out $79 a year for an Amazon Prime membership.

Read on for a few snippets from the first Fire reviews, starting with…

Tim Stevens, Engadget:

The Kindle Fire is quite an achievement at $200. It’s a perfectly usable tablet that feels good in the hand and has a respectably good looking display up front. Yes, power users will find themselves a little frustrated with what they can and can’t do on the thing without access to the Android Market but, in these carefree days of cloud-based apps ruling the world, increasingly all you need is a good browser. That the Fire has.

Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun-Times:

Take an iPad, solve its two biggest problems, and you’d hope to wind up with something exactly like Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The iPad has a 10-inch screen and costs a minimum of $499. The Fire slips into many pockets and purses and will set you back just $199. Its designers started off with a fundamentally good idea, executed that idea extremely well (despite a few 1.0 hiccups), and wound up with a product that fills a sorely-felt gap in the marketplace.

David Pogue, New York Times:

The Fire deserves to be a disruptive, gigantic force — it’s a cross between a Kindle and an iPad, a more compact Internet and video viewer at a great price. But at the moment, it needs a lot more polish; if you’re used to an iPad or “real” Android tablet, its software gremlins will drive you nuts.

Josh Topolsky, The Verge:

This isn’t an iPad killer … [but] there’s no question that the Fire is a really terrific tablet for its price. The amount of content you have access to — and the ease of getting to that content — is notable to say the least. The device is decently designed, and the software — while lacking some polish — is still excellent compared to pretty much anything in this range (and that includes the Nook Color). It’s a well thought out tablet that can only get better as the company refines the software. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great start, and at $200, that may be all Amazon needs this holiday shopping season.

Donald Bell, CNET:

The Kindle Fire is not the best tablet I’ve seen this year, but I have to give credit to Amazon for seeing something that no other manufacturer–not even Apple–was able to grasp. When you look at the gap between what tablets are capable of doing, and what people actually use them for, you’ll find that most people just want to be entertained.

The Kindle Fire is here to entertain us, and at $199, I suspect many will take Amazon up on the offer. If you need a tablet that can keep up with your jet-setting, spreadsheet-editing, video-chatting lifestyle, I can point you to a few dozen better options. For the rest of you, read on.

As for me, I’ll have to wait like everyone else to get my hands on the Kindle Fire; once I do, though, I’ll post my own review.

So, what do you think: Would you consider the smaller, less-polished but cheaper Fire over the larger, peppier, but pricier iPad?

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Announced Wednesday morning at a New York press conference, the $79 Kindle is on sale now, while the Touch and Fire will land in November.

So, what makes the new Kindles so special, and different from the Kindle readers that were already on sale? Let’s take a look at each of the new models, one at a time. (And just to be clear, I haven’t had the chance to handle the new Kindles in person yet, so no—these aren’t reviews.)

The $79 Kindle
Armed with the same six-inch, black-and-white E Ink display (good for reading in direct sunlight) as its predecessor, the cheapest Kindle of them all is also the smallest at just 6.5 by 4.5 by 0.34 inches—and at six ounces, it’s also the lightest.

There’s no full keyboard, but you can still turn pages or (laboriously) tap out the titles of books using the five-way navigational mouse—and yes, you can download new books wirelessly if you’re in range of a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Battery life for the $79 Kindle is only half that of the previous Kindle, meaning you’ll only go a month between charges rather than two.

And again, there’s the price tag: $79. Looks like I’ve run out of excuses for not getting a Kindle for myself.

Check out the Kindle on Amazon

Kindle Touch
About the same size as the cheaper Kindle but an ounce and a half heavier, the $99 Kindle Touch marks the first Kindle with a touchscreen, good for turning pages, pulling up menus, and typing out book titles with a few taps on the screen.

Again, we’re talking a six-inch, black-and-white E Ink display that you can read outdoors, along with two months of battery life—double that of the cheaper, $79 Kindle.

And while the new, cheaper Kindle can only download books over Wi-Fi, a $150 version of the Kindle Touch adds free 3G support, good for downloading Kindle books in more than 100 countries—even if you’re not in range of a Wi-Fi hotspot.

All in all, very enticing—although personally, I’m not sure I’m sold on the need to pay extra for a touchscreen Kindle, given than most of the time you’re doing little more than turning from one page to another.

Check out the Kindle Touch on Amazon

Kindle Fire
Unlike previous Kindles, the $199 Kindle Fire boasts a seven-inch, full-color screen, along with the ability to play video and music, plus browse the web, check your email, and read Kindle books.

But here’s the thing about the Kindle Fire: it doesn’t use the same E Ink display as the standard Kindle does. Instead, the Fire boasts a backlit LCD display, same as on the iPad and most Android tablets. (Indeed, the Fire basically is an Android tablet, bells and whistles aside.)

The good thing about an LCD display? Color, plus the ability to display video. And the bad thing about LCD screens? They’re nearly impossible to read in direct sunlight. That’s the trade-off.

The Fire comes with other compromises, too. You’ll have to settle for just eight hours of battery life, versus weeks and weeks on the black-and-white Kindles. It’s also missing some key features you’ll find in most Android tablets, not to mention the iPad; there’s no camera, for instance, nor a microphone, so don’t count on snapping photos or video chatting with friends.

Then again, the 14-ounce Fire makes for one of the cheapest Android tablets around—just $199, versus at least $499 for the iPad or other, comparable Android tablets. Nice.

Meanwhile, the bells and whistles on the Fire are nothing to sneeze at. Expect free and unlimited “cloud” storage for all books, movies, and TV shows purchased through Amazon, along with a new web browser, dubbed “Silk,” that promises ultra-fast mobile browsing.

In other words, the Fire is shaping up as a cheap, light, and snazzy entertainment tablet, loaded with on-demand access to thousands of movies, TV shows, music tracks, and books. Nice.

Check out the Kindle Fire on Amazon

So, thoughts on the new Kindles? Questions? Leave ’em below!

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