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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.
Wouldn't the Nook Tablet be a more appropriate competitor?
That must be why the site is slashdotted !
This is fine, but it says that the nook Color is the Kindle Fire's closest competitor. The nook Tablet is now, and it has a helluva lot more horsepower than the Kindle Fire. (And a better looking body...) So it makes me wonder what kind of kool-aid this reviewer is drinking. Particularly since the nook is by far the most hack friendly device mass produced in years!
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).
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
that in almost 2 years the whole industry can't catch-up with Apple.
It was OK back then but two years without any bright, no-rooting-required competitor?
The technology, software and know-how is there but the whole *package* has been delivered by Apple only so far.
Google probably does disservice to its platform by targeting it to telcos and not to consumers.
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.
Interesting. But without the cloud services the Fire is stuck with 8GB of non-expandable storage. Which combined with lack of blue-tooth, cameras, gps, etc means that its use is limited. Even once you get CM9 etc installed, lost of apps simply will not run because they are looking for hardware and drivers that dont exist on the device.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
So in other words, neither device is optimal for the standard tablet use case. My interest in the NT stemmed from the NC, mostly as an OMAP4 hack target that was still usable as a portable device, alas I shall stick to working on my Nook Color.
Well, the Nook has technical hurdles to overcome. That may just be a matter of waiting till someone cracks it. The Fire is easy to root, but I see no reason to do so. Look at it this way, what do you gain by rooting a Kindle Fire? You can already install third party APKs by checking the option in the system preferences and you can use the Android developer tools to side-load apps if you add the devices ID number to your INI file. Once rooted however you lose access to the Amazon cloud and video streaming services. So overall, it seems like it cripples the device more then it elevates it.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
The security mechanism is the same as the one Motorola has employed on all of their OMAP based devices. At most, kexec may be available to try something, however you're still stuck bending over backwards and twisting yourself to get around an extremely punitive security system that won't hesitate to brick your system.
Of course, I don't look at these devices for how effectively they can try and stick their fingers in my wallet, but how effectively I can make them do what I want them to, which is one reason I ruled out the Kindle Fire as soon as I learned it had no SD card slot.
The Kindle Fire is about 90% of what I'd want an iPad for at about 1/3rd the price. That's a no-brainer. It's a very capable tablet as long as you know what you are getting and don't have unrealistic (i.e. on par with the iPad) expectations. There are a couple of UI/usability things that hopefully will be addressed in an update... but even that not withstanding it is a very impressive device.
Yes, but will it run Windows 3.1 or NT 4.0?
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
You can already install third party APKs by checking the option in the system preferences and you can use the Android developer tools to side-load apps if you add the devices ID number to your INI file.
It's so easy! I'm sure everyone will be doing it!
#DeleteChrome
typically biased essay, nothing to see here.
Damn shame, but that's how dickish companies are these days.
Complete shame, we expect them to subsidize a product and then allow us to root the devices to break the subsidy model. Taking it to the man, no one should be allow to make a cent in profit off of me!
Anyone capable of rooting would be capable of typing "adb install" at the command line.
Will the Nook tablet run the Kindle app?
What if you hack it?
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Hey look, it's a stupid and invalid point. But that's why you're posting as an anonymous coward.
I sure don't. I expect them to charge a reasonable price, then GTFO once the transaction is completed. It isn't my problem if they subsidize the product, and even if they did and I bought it, I'd still complain if they crippled it. Just like everyone who has ever bought a Motorola handset that is now no longer under contract or was bought unlocked (i.e. Europe.)
So in your model, if someone buys a Nook Tablet but only uses it for e-mail and games, they are also stealing from B&N?
Yeah, that works fine on my netbook. Fuckbrains!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's interesting how people so willingly give up their rights based on hearsay. The Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act states that a manufacturer cannot refuse to honor a warranty because a non-OEM part was used or a modification was made, unless they can prove that said part/modification caused the equipment failure in question. If you brick your device by mucking around in /system after rooting it, then you're out of luck. If the battery stops holding a charge, then rooting had nothing to do with it, so it's covered under warranty. Obviously you might not have much luck explaining this legal concept to a support drone, but realistically they won't notice it's rooted in the first place.
Once rooted however you lose access to the Amazon cloud and video streaming services.
That's wrong. Rooting equals root access. Rooting leaves the Amazon ROM fully intact. Flashing is the dangerous action. Flashing to an AOSP-based ROM will erase the Amazon modifications. There are benefits to rooting the Fire. Root access allows you to install the Android browser and required system libraries. Root access allows you to flash customized Amazon ROMs. Root access allows you to do anything and lose nothing.
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
I wonder why the comparison was made against the nook color, and not the nook tablet? The tablet is more of a direct competitor. $50 more for the nook tablet gets you the same cpu as the fire, 2x the ram (1GB), 2x the internal storage (16GB), support for up to an additional 32GB via external storage, a less reflective display, and a microphone.
You can even run the amazon app store, kindle app, and amazon instant video player app on the nook tablet. Both the Nook Tablet and the Fire have been rooted, and both have been reported to be able to access the Android Market.
I think it would be more fair to compare the Fire to the Nook and Kobo Vox. I recently purchased the Vox, and spec-wise it's very similar to the Nook, similar dimensions, bright screen, 8GB internal storage but an SD slot to expand up to 32GB for a total of 40. It doesn't so far allow you access to the Android Market, but it's similar enough to the Nook that there should be a cyanogenmod port at some point.
.. I just saved $300 or more.
My feeling about the Vox, and probably the others as the hardware is similarly spec'd, is not a great tablet, but perfect for consuming most media types. Even at 800MHz, it "can" play video at 720p with minimal stuttering, and the battery life is good if you mind it properly. The screen is a bit laggy, and the touch-sensitivity isn't stellar, but I just got it as a way to get familiar with Android, and if I brick it, all the e-readers at this price point are around $200 so no great loss.
The iPad2 is going to obviously kill all three of the others in most respects. But if I spent $500+ on a tablet, and it didn't do any ONE thing well, I'd be a little disappointed. At $200, if it does ANYTHING well,
It's fun to play around with. All the $500-ish tablets seem a lot like buying PCs back in the day, when 486s were the latest and greatest. So, I bought a 386 to familiarize myself with the OS, and won't spend $500 or more, until maybe next generation, more powerful, etc.
If you want a neat toy, any of the three would probably suffice, and similarly suck with the same pain points. The only real difference between them is storage, maybe screen quality, and ease of modding/loading the apps you want. I have gotten my corp e-mail working on it using Touchdown, VMware View client was decent (for very occasional emergency desktop access) and caused some head-scratching showing people a Windows desktop running on a droid-based e-reader. Boxee remote works fine, and I watched about an hour of "The Art of Flight" in 720p on a plane last week, and it only took the battery down 10%.
I'd say all three (Nook, Fire, Vox) are pretty much toys, but cool toys. I like the Vox for the screen brightness and expandable storage.
Bingo! Which is why I wrote off hacked android devices as a tablet a while ago. I have already been down this road and ran into those bumps.
if you want a great functioning tablet get an already designed as a generic android tablet running ICS out of the box, a galaxy tab or Xoom. Yes you need to spend $400+ to get one that works great. problem is even after you buy a real tablet, you STILL need to hack it because samsung and motrola bastardize the OS. It seems it is impossible for a company to leave android pure and deliver it on a device.
There is no free lunch, contrary to what others say. the only chance at a free lunch is if someone cracks the nook completely so we can get a decent OS on it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You could get a Kobo Vox http://www.kobobooks.com/kobovox_tech ... It's suggested retail price is $200, and it isn't an e-book reader running a limited/locked down Android, it's an Android tablet that comes with the Kobo app pre-installed. You get full un-fettered Android, including everything you'd expect from a more expensive Android-based tablet: the Android market, GMail, web browser, etc.. It's only a 7" display, and it's got an 800MHz processor, so that may be a bit anemic, but what do you expect from something that's being sold as an ebook reader? It's got the same processor and memory as a mid-range Android phone, and it should be fine for most use.
I won't be buying one because I don't feel like I need a tablet, and I'm quite happy with my Kobo Touch ebook reader, but if I was in the market for a tablet/ebook reader, this one would be top of my list. No GPS in it, but otherwise it has everything you'd expect an Android tablet to have.
I don't see either as being all that useful.
Load them up with a 5mp, preferably 8mp or higher camera and let people have fun. The problem with the iPad's camera is that its too low resolution and the form factor makes it inconvenient. These two lesser tablets are only for consumption of a limited media but the Fire has the right size for ease of use (you can slip into the pocket of dress pants easily, if not every coat known to man). Yet what they would be good at is something they don't do, take and show pictures. Yes I know phones can do that but not everyone wants to be stuck with the plans required to use them
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The instructions were brand new and horribly incomplete at the time, but it was fun to hunt down all of the pieces to the puzzle on an environment I was completely unfamilar with. I was mostly interested in learning more about the Android platform, and also to enable Google's Android Marketplace and other Google apps.
I unrooted the Fire (so that Amazon Video on Demand would continue to work), and used the Marketplace to download a better video player app (MX Video Player) and a number of decent games. I didn't go with the Dolphin browser or the GO Launcher for my defaults. (Not that I'm excited about Amazon's launcher.) So basically, I have what acts like a stock Kindle Fire, except I've got Android Marketplace access. I think that combination makes this a winning device. I'll still purchase from Amazon when it makes sense, but I'll go to Google for selection.
The only significant snag I've seen so far is that the pop-up menu bar onto the Kindle Fire slightly confuses apps by a number of pixels about screen size or placement. Some apps will chop off the top of their app's display. Of course, others will use the bottom of the screen for their own menu bar, leaving you with scant pixels (in landscape mode) to hit their buttons. That, and a few apps like the VLC Direct player seems to get me into situations which lock my Kindle from time to time, so I mostly don't use it.
At least when I download Marketplace apps, I can delete applications now and now worry about them haunting my 'cloud applications' screen forever. If I download Angry Birds Free, and then pay for Angry Birds (and remove the free version), do I really need to see two different Angry Birds icons on my device forever, Amazon? Well, I asked, and you apologized that I couldn't delete it. You hinted that you may allow this in the future, and you gave me a $5 credit for my inconvenience. You're not so bad.
Anyhow, rooting and installing the Amazon Marketplace is a little bit of a bumpy road, but it seems to be totally worth it.
I love how all the geek sites talk about hacking. Vertical markets (walled gardens are the future). Most people (84.67%) do not want to hack, they want to USE. This is why Apple has so much fucking money. They made easy to use consumption devices, that gives people what they want.
What needs to happen is for someone to make a whitebox tablet that has all the cool shit geeks wants and is totally open for Android. Make it Wifi only (no 3G, 4G shit) since geeks are going to tether to their smartphones anyways, and this frees you from all the Carrier shit. Like a FrankenTablet (I just copyrighted that, jk) where you use all the parts that currently exist and they just bring them together in a form factor. Online only, not sold in stores. The site could have a suggestion board for a somewhat crowdsourced design. Start with a 1000 unit run, then build to order. It might cost a little more, but then you will have the ability to get what you want and geek out all over it.
Sounds like a business plan for some VC with balls to hop on.
Legal, I hereby release this idea to anyone who wants to use it. Boilerplate, Boilerplate.
Are you sure this is wrong? My rooted Fire no longer is able to stream from Amazon video.
The Vox is AOSP, and not certified by Google. Out of the box, you're limited to a small, relatively unknown app market with a limited subset of apps, and no Gmail, Talk, or other standard Google Android apps. On the other hand, there will almost certainly be a hack that adds this in shortly, if one does not exist already.
That said, it does look like a nice $200 tablet. Most people who complain about the lack of quality/speed/reliability in a converted Vox, Nook or Kindle are expecting Xoom performance from a $200 investment. A Civic is a nice car, but don't expect it to do everything a Lexus can.
Does anyone know a way to deactivate Silk? Besides be slow, and the privacy issue with all your communication going through amazon, it also breaks many things. IP Location, File Uploads and internal Networks are all broken with Silk. Not only that, but I've seen it choke on even basic web pages. I just want it turned off.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
The Vox's power management is awful as of the current firmware, v15. If you let the Vox handle power management, it often refuses to wake up wifi (if it wakes up at all) and you need to power cycle it to fix it. If you leave wifi on, the battery life goes to hell. I'm returning mine this afternoon.
If there's a cyanogenmod release with the market for it in the future, I might pick up a new one again just for CM. The Vox's Kobo app is the exact same one that can be downloaded through the google market, so I wouldn't be losing anything by going this route.
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.
I'm wondering if the parent was referring to the nook color which has a great (IMHO) hacking community behind it.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
One possibility though is that if B&N has made a properly first or second stage boot loader that does not check the signature for the next stage, then all we need to do is get our hands on it, and the device will be unlocked by the end of the day.
Otherwise kexec is the indeed the only option, but it is completely feasible. The system will load modified kernel modules, so we simply need to create a kexec module, and load it, then load a new kernel. Pretty simple, all things considered. The reason we do not do this on the the Motorola phones is that when we try the start-up sequence of the cellular modem driver ends up locking up the already initialized device, thus we phone capability. That would not be an issue on the Nook Tablet, so it is just a matter of time for some sufficiently motivated individual to do this.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
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.
It's called Archos. They've been doing it longer then Apple. Check out the Archos 80G9. Wifi only (there is a dongle you can buy for $49, and put ANY dim card in, or use the dongle port as a fully functioning USB port) it has hdmi out, plays FLAC files out of the box, and cah be had with up to a 250gb hard drive. Also has an app for your android cell phone to use as a remote control when it is plugged into the tv via hdmi. Runs stock android, with Archos's media player (that is a plus). It starts at $269 on Amazon.
Look at how fast Archos abandons their products. I have a Archos tablest stuck at Android v1.6 and Archos stopped supporting it less than a year after I bought it. It is so broken it doesn't even come with a working email client. It uses the OMAPx security and nobody has broken it.
Archos did supply a unsupported SDK but, after over a year, nobody has put a working AOSP on it. I don't think all the secret sauce is in the SDK.
Best book I've read on Kindle so far is Ada, Legend of a Healer. I'm looking forward to see how the cover and inside graphics look on the Fire.
http://www.adaslegend.com/
Here's the coral cache link (assuming I can get the page to load...)
coding is life
You don't need to hack a Xoom. It's pure Android.
Once rooted however you lose access to the Amazon cloud and video streaming services. So overall, it seems like it cripples the device more then it elevates it.
Just rename the "su" binary to something else and amazon video starts working again.
The question isn't whether it can be rooted. The question is whether you can reflash it with a different OS.
Yes you need to spend $400+ to get one that works great. problem is even after you buy a real tablet, you STILL need to hack it because samsung and motrola bastardize the OS.
Xoom is "Google experience device" - it runs stock software, exactly how Google intended.
Actually, most Honeycomb tablets are close to stock - much closer than phones ever were. It seems that, when Google handed out Honeycomb licenses, the requirement to not go on a modding frenzy was one of the requirements.
Oh, and if you want a cheap Honeycomb tablet, the cheapest to date is Asus Transformer (the first one, not the upcoming Prime) - $380 on Amazon, and you can find it even cheaper if you look around. Xoom goes for slightly over $400 these days, but the display is not IPS. Galaxy Tab 10.1 is still around $600.
The only "mixed reviews" I have seen of the Fire have been penned by Apple fanbois desperate to kill off the competition. Actually for the price the Fire is good value and reviewers should be saying this. Instead they seem obsessed with comparing it with an over priced Apple 2 which is nearly three times the price. It is like comparing a mini with a jag. The fact that most reviewers do not provide decent reviews show how Apple far has penetrated the media industry. At the moment any product which appears in the press for review that counters Apple will receive a mixed review.
This will continue until readers complain and there are a few high profile sackings of "journalists" who sacrifice their credibility for a hardware ideology.
Plus, the Fire already allows loading of third party apps, so that's even less reason to root. I run the nook app, the dolphin browser, etc.
The "app store" shenanigans? Why do you want the "Android Market" over the "Amazon App Store" or the other way around? Does one only carry stuff like "Angry Birds" and the other doesn't? Is the selection that much better on one side vs the other?
How did we even get here? Why not just let people click on links from a software developers web site like we do on our PCs today? Centralization is fantastic for some things, but as iTunes has shown, great for music but no so great for applications. I don't know anyone who actually uses iTunes to browse apps. It's either word of mouth or nothing. Usually nothing.
why in the hell would someone buy an android device with a signed bootloader ansd/or checksummed kernel ? this is seriously beyond me , well at least it's not putting money in apples chest , opensource software on a locked hardware ........ if you really love android you should boycott any manuf that ships locked boot loaders
I sure don't. I expect them to charge a reasonable price, then GTFO once the transaction is completed. It isn't my problem if they subsidize the product, and even if they did and I bought it, I'd still complain if they crippled it. Just like everyone who has ever bought a Motorola handset that is now no longer under contract or was bought unlocked (i.e. Europe.)
Then the Amazon Fire is not you. There is still a market for it for it though.
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT