A Kindle Fire Review For Those Who Plan To Void the Warranty

The mixed reviews so far available for the new Amazon Fire tablet mostly address the Fire in its intended role as a locked-down portal through which to buy and consume ready-made content from Amazon. New submitter terracode writes with a different kind of review, which "goes into depth on the Kindle Fire's hardware, and provides details on how to root and tweak the tablet." The article also provides a friendly chart comparing the hardware in the Fire to that of the Nook Color and the iPad 2.

Kindle Fire is one device I see no reason to root.

[Kenja]

The whole point of the Fire is to use it as a content consumption device for Amazons services. It frankly, is not a great tablet otherwise as it lacks things such as a flash card slot. So long as I use my Fire to view Amazon content, it works great and the missing hardware isn't noticed. If I where to look for a low cost tablet to root and mess around with the Nook is leaps and bounds better and worth the extra 50$. But I just wanted an eReader and client for Amazons video services. So I went with the Fire and have little issues with it (the carousel is problematic so far as you can not control what gets placed in it).

Re:Kindle Fire is one device I see no reason to ro

[Microlith]

If I where to look for a low cost tablet to root and mess around with the Nook is leaps and bounds better and worth the extra 50$

From the analysis of the Nook Tablet thus far, it's actually less capable than the Kindle due to the signed bootloader and checksummed kernel and ramdisk. As a result it's likely that the Kindle will see CM9 and ICS, while the Nook Tablet will be perpetually stuck on Gingerbread.

Unless something changes drastically on the Nook Tablet, B&N have done a complete 180 on the hackability of their Android-based devices this go around. Damn shame, but that's how dickish companies are these days.

Re:It's kinda scary

[adolf]

As long as "many" is greater than "few," but no more than 2, and "few" is equal to 1, then "many core" makes perfect sense: It means exactly 2.

It's just Chinglish.

To translate: "7 inch Android 2.3 tablet with capacitive TFT touch screen, multiple A10 cores (which are fantastic!) at 1.5GHz, 512MB of RAM, and 2160p decoding of 3D video. Also includes Flash 10.3 and Wifi."

Is it really so hard?

I've bought wire from Wonderful Cable before, and motherboards from Diamond Flower Inc, and all were fine products. If someone offered me a chance to get a great deal on widgets from Super Happy Flower Star in Shanghai, I'd give it a look.

I'd also be pleased to buy a tablet from a company offering "Allwinner Many Core" CPUs, if it makes any sense at all and the price were right.

*shrug*

Not everyone, believe it or not, is able to produce useful English marketing text.

Re:Nice, but...

[narcc]

Oddly enough, the Blackberry PlayBook will, in fact, run windows 3.1 [theverge.com]

Now you can get your "ski free" and "rodent's revenge" fix on the go!

Re:Kindle Fire is one device I see no reason to ro

[para_droid]

That may just be a matter of waiting till someone cracks it.

The Nook Tablet has been rooted: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1354487 [xda-developers.com]

Re:WTF: Why not compare the nook Tablet?

[thegarbz]

Particularly since the nook is by far the most hack friendly device mass produced in years!

The Nook what? The Nook Color was. But the Tablet? Maybe you should actually go out and have a look at how hacker friendly the Nook Tablet really is. A quick search on the XDA Developers forum seem to think that the tablet is efuse locked and works with signed bootloaders only. That's about as hack friendly as Motorola's worst phone.

The Kindle on the other hand has nothing more than a token lock to prevent rooting and existing utilities actually simply worked without modification. No sight of signed bootloaders either. So if I had to bet a body part on which one will get Cyanogenmod 9 first, the smart money is on the Kindle Fire.

Re:Nook Color

[nullchar]

Yes, this review should have compared against the Nook Tablet.

Nook Tablet is also an A9 dual core 1GHz, it has twice the ram at 1GB than the Fire and twice the on-board storage at 16GB. They're both the OMAP4430 with the same graphics chip. If you're just looking at hardware, it appears the Nook Tablet wins:

(Same rows as the table in TFA. /. junk char filter wouldn't let me post the row header)

Nook Tablet
TI OMAP4430
ARM Cortex A9 (1 GHz dual core)
POWERVR SGX540 graphics
1 GB Ram
16 GB on-board storage
1024x600 screen res

Source: https://nookdeveloper.barnesandnoble.com/product/nook-tablet-specs.html [barnesandnoble.com]

Just get a real android tablet

[walterbyrd]

With tablets like the Vizio 8" and the Lenovo Ideapad A1 selling for under $200; why bother with restricted, proprietary, non-sense?

Tablets can read any format without hacking, and have a plethora of other features such as cameras, bluetooth, microSD slots, and GPS.

If you want eInk, get an eReader, but don't bother with these LED eReaders, just use your phone, or get a real tablet.