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Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets aren’t necessarily meant to be hacked, upgraded, or repaired by customers. They’re basically cheap tablets with good screens and decent performance designed to get you to buy more content from Amazon’s digital music, movie, book, and app stores.
But Amazon’s tablets do have a track record of being pretty easy to root, install custom ROMs on, and repair. Until now.
The folks at repair shop iFixit tore apart the new Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 7 and they weren’t particularly pleased with what they found.
Here’s a roundup of tech news from around the web.
- Kindle Fire HDX 7 gets the iFixit teardown, found to be surprisingly tough to repair
The battery is glued into place and can’t be replaced without ripping out the motherboard… which is difficult to do. The LCD is fused to the glass, meaning you need to replace the whole thing if the glass cracks. All told, there’s an awful lot of adhesive to rip through. Â [iFixit] - Paranoid Android 0-Day gApps: always up-to-date Google Apps for any Android ROM
Custom Android ROMS tend to ship without Gmail, Google Maps, the Play Store, and other core apps. This keeps Google relatively happy, since those apps aren’t open source (like the operating system). But you can install them manually. Unfortunately finding the appropriate gApps package for your device can be an exercise in frustration. Paranoid Android is hoping to make the process a lot simpler. [+Paranoid Android] - Windows 8.1 tips: Boot to the desktop, set universal wallpaper, shutdown more quickly, etc
Windows 8.1 starts rolling out later this week. Here’s a roundup of some of the feature that set it apart from Windows 8.. and how to use them. [TechRadar] - HP Chromebook 14 is available for $349
The HP Chromebook 11 isn’t the only new Chrome OS laptop from HP. The company’s 14 inch model features a faster Intel Celeron 2955U Haswell processor and a $349 price tag. It’s now available for purchase. [Amazon] - Xiaomi has no current plans for a smartwatch
Chinese company Xiaomi may be taking the smartphone (and smart TV) spaces by storm, but the company says it doesn’t plan to jump into smartwatch waters… at least not yet. [GizChina] - VirtualBox 4.3 adds support for Windows 8.1, OS X 10.9, and multi-touch input on guest systems
VirtualBox is an app that lets you run one operating system from within another… and now you can use it with the latest versions of Winodws or OS X. [Phoronix] - Angry Birds Go is a kart racer that shows the birds have less and less to be angry about, coming Dec 11th
Seriously… these birds are rolling in dough right now. I know money can’t buy happiness, but you’d think it could buy a good security system to protect their eggs… The game looks pretty awesome though. [Rovio]
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