The Amazon Fire is a $50 tablet with a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel IPS display, a quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage, and Amazon’s Fire OS software, which is based on Android 5.1.
Not a fan of Amazon’s version of Android? Some folks have already figured out how to install the Google Play Store on the Fire Tablet, making it easy to install thousands of apps and games that aren’t available from the Amazon Appstore.
Now you can also root the Fire tablet.
Rooting the tablet gives you access to files, directories, and settings that are normally protected. On the one hand, this makes it a little easier to (at least temporarily) break your tablet. But on the other hand, it allows you to install apps that can modify the behavior of the Fire tablet… or just apps that require root permissions.
You can find instructions for rooting the Fire tablet at the xda-developers forum, which has scripts for using a Windows or Linux computer to attain root access on the tablet.
Next up? Developers are working on custom recovery tools for the Fire tablet, which make it possible to load custom ROMs on the tablet, completely replacing Amazon’s software with third-party firmware.
Update: It’s already possible to install Xposed Framework, which lets you modify the behavior of the tablet without installing a custom ROM.
Not sure it’s really worth it any more, even at that end of the market. When I bought an early Nook tablet and rooted it to put Cyanogenmod on it, it was one of a very few decent cheap 7″ tablets on the market.
Today, Newegg has over 600 tablets for sale under $75, and even if you remove the third party sellers, there’s still over 75 different tablets available direct from Newegg itself.
Sure, they’re mostly going to be crap, but unless you like hacking around with tablets (which is certainly a legit reason), there really isn’t much point in buying a cheap Amazon tablet just so you can get root it and mod it these days.
How many of those up to $50 have IPS panels? I found only one: MSI Enjoy 71 open box and out of stock.
An interesting point. I think one of the bigger considerations is that this is a fairly well known brand and I think will be popular enough to have a decent dev community.
The downside is that the tablets come with “Special Offers.”
Right.