Note: our detailed tutorial about how to root / jailbreak Kindle Fire is live here.
Big day today, Amazon officially announced their Android based tablet – Kindle Fire. With technical specs better than Nook Color and a lower price – $200 compared with $250, it is obvious that the new tablet will not only smashed through every other Android tablet on the market at this point, including Nook Color (which, you might not know but it is the second best selling tablet after iPad), but, it might as well prove a formidable competitor to iPad itself. Why? Well, as the recent sales for HP TouchPad proved, consumers are voting with their wallet and at $200 the new Kindle Fire is getting close to the impulse buying price point.
While technical specs are significantly behind iPad 2 with only 8GB internal memory, no webcam, no Bluetooth and no 3G (see the full list below), most of the people won’t use these features anyway. Technical specs aside though, Amazon worked hard to create their own user experience and their own UI with Android hidden somewhere behind. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll still find a store (Amazon has its own Android store for a while already) and the daily free app provides is the icing on the cake, but a quite large percentage of Nook Color buyers got their toy specifically to root it later and install the official Android marketplace powered by Google. I do expect that to be also the case with the new Kindle Fire, since popular applications like Netflix or Hulu Plus are only available through Google’s own Android Marketplace. B&N never provided official numbers for Nook Color buyers that rooted / replaced B&N Android flavor but we can safely assume the number are quite large.
While the details are sketchy for now, with no official details about whether Kindle Fire will allow side loading of apk files, I expect a lot of potential buyers will want more than what is currently available in Amazon app store. Whether Amazon will strike a deal to get Netflix / Hulu Plus in their own app store or actively block them and keep the OS locked, a lot of us will want to root / jailbreak them and with a release date of November 15th 2011, it is never too early to plan in advance. The smart folks from CyanogenMod are thinking the same way for sure.
Another unintended victim of the upcoming Kindle Fire will be, interestingly enough the market containing the crappy under $100 tablets manufactured and sold directly from China (Craig CMP 738a is one such example) that are currently inundating eBay pages. After all, who would want to pay $100 for a half baked resistive display device when $200 will give you a dual core thin and light IPS + capacitive display marvel?
Would you also root / jailbreak your Kindle Fire? Why? Let us now!
…and I almost forgot…a quick glance through the tech specs reveal the lack of support for the popular epub format…those root / jailbreak How To’s for Kindle Fire cannot come soon enough. We’ll keep you posted.
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