Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet has a great user interface, but many of our readers already want to get rid of it. That's OK. Amazon isn't doing anything special to prevent techies from "rooting" and rewriting the software on its powerful yet inexpensive new tablet, Jon Jenkins, director of Amazon's Silk browser project said.
"It's going to get rooted, and what you do after you root it is up to you," Jenkins said.
(Curious about rooting? Check out our Concise Guide to Android Rooting, which explains what the fuss is about.)
Jenkins said he didn't know whether the bootloader was locked, which is one hurdle Android hackers face when altering their devices. The company won't help hackers root the tablet, it just isn't actively trying to stop them.
The tablet has a USB port and mass storage mode, so you can also sideload Android APK program files, even without rooting it. That will be one way to get apps not available in Amazon's Appstore onto the Fire.
So why root the tablet? Fans of plain-vanilla Android tablets—yes, there are some—will find a lot of power here for $199. The Kindle Fire runs Google Android Gingerbread (2.3) and it has 8GB of storage, a 1GHz, dual-core TI OMAP4 processor, a 1,024-by-600 screen and around 7 hours of battery life, Amazon said.
The Android hacking community will hopefully work to combine Amazon's innovations like the fast Silk browser with apps and features not available on the tablet, such as Google's full Android Market store.
In any case, we'll have to see what happens when the Fire comes out in November.