Adventures In Rooting: Running Jelly Bean On Last Year's Kindle Fire

concealment writes "Luckily, the Fire's low price and popularity relative to other Android tablets has made it a common target for Android's bustling open-source community, which has automated most of the sometimes-messy process of rooting and flashing your tablet. The Kindle Fire Utility boils the whole rooting process down to a couple of steps, and from there it's pretty easy to find pretty-stable Jelly Bean ROMs. A CyanogenMod-based version is actively maintained, but I prefer the older Hashcode ROM, which is very similar to the interface on the Nexus 7."

Making the best of a bad situation

[Dreamlandlocal]

The original Kindle Fire OS is an abomination. Out of the box it has possibly the worst UI in the mobile space and it is quickly apparent that a concerted effort was made to restrict what you can (consume Amazon content) and can't (everything else) do with the the hardware.

Anyone who reads this site, owns a Kindle and has not modified the default configuration in some way is doing themselves an enormous disservice. From side-loading a new launcher and few of quality-of-life apps, to rooting, to a flashing a whole new ROM, there is a variety of ways to make the best of your (bad) situation.

Despite the best efforts of devs, last year's kindle fire is ultimately a very flawed device. It has absolutely nothing to recommend it over the alternatives and if the new crop of kindles is anything like the last generation, take your $200 and spent it on a Nexus 7.

Mine is rooted

[__aaqvdr516]

I jumped through a few ROMS before I settled on the Hellfire Kindle Sandwich.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1585814 [xda-developers.com]

Unless things have changed, you don't get hardware acceleration unless you're using some modified version of the stock ROM (hence the sandwich).

It runs reasonably well for what I do with it, which is next to nothing. If it wouldn't have been free, I wouldn't have it.

I have a Kindle Fire and a Google Nexus 7

[linuxguy]

I have a Kindle Fire and a Google Nexus 7. My advice to anybody out there considering buying an Amazon Kindle Fire is: "Don't do it"

Do yourself a favor and buy the Nexus 7. Kindle Fire OS is utter crap. It has limited hardware, is slower, cannot compete on battery life or RAM or cameras ... the list goes on. In a world with Google Nexus 7, nobody should be buying Kindle Fire.