Amazon Kindle Fire With Ice Cream Sandwich?
Have you heard of an Amazon Kindle Fire running on Android Ice Cream Sandwich? If your answer is no, brace yourselves because it is bound to happen sooner or later due to the fact that the code is open source.
Since the release of the code for Android 4.0 or better known as Android Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), there have been attempts to install this OS to devices such as Amazon's Kindle Fire. When Kindle Fire was first launched, there were several users who already figured out how to root the tablet and at the same time install the Android Market. Nowadays, hackers have another target in mind and this is installing Android ICS to replace Kindle Fire's existing Android version.
Steven, a hacker who has attempted to install Android ICS in his Kindle Fire shared his experience through posting his video depicting what he did as well posting in this forum to document what happened. According to his forum post, the things that worked well when he installed Android ICS were the tablet's touch panel, hardware graphics, and audio. The features that did not work well included the tablet's Wi-Fi capability, accelerometer, and light sensor. He also disclosed plans to start an open source project for Android ICS on Kindle Fire.
Hackers have targeted Amazon's Kindle Fire since it was released due to the fact that its selling price is comparably lower than other tablets (US$200). Despite having a much less tablet cost, Amazon's Kindle Fire still has competitive tablet specifications such as having a 1GHz dual-core processor and 512MB of RAM. Despite these specifications, there are certain limitations in using the Amazon Kindle Fire. Users could only utilize a modified version of Android 2.3 Gingerbread as its OS-something that most users would like to change hence the hacking attempts.
So far, little resistance from Amazon has been felt from the company regarding these hacking attempts. Despite the slow resistance, there are reports stating that Amazon loses income on every tablet that is sold in the market. These reports also state that the company is relying on Amazon's built-in services to bring in the profit for the company.